The Earlier Renaissance  

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The Earlier Renaissance (1901) is a book by George Saintsbury.

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PREFACE.

Of the difficulties, as regards delimitation of frontiers, in the designing and editing of a History of European Literature by periods, none are more obvious beforehand, or more substantial in experience, than those connected with the all-important and interesting time of the Eenaissance. To that word in general, and to the signification commonly and generally at- tached to it, no serious objection need be taken, when the possible error of supposing any death, or even suspended animation, in the rich and vigorous litera- ture of the Middle Ages is once guarded against. The effect produced on literature by the revived study of the classics, direct from the originals, is a fact of which it is equally impossible to deny the reality or to contest the importance. But it is no less a fact, though a much more complicated one, that this in- fluence was exerted at different times in different countries, and in different manners at different times

VI PREFACE.

in the same country. Tims, for instance, some, not without plausibility, have carried the Eenaissance in Italy as far back as Petrarch, if not even as far back as Dante — authors dealt with, and necessarily dealt with, not even in the volume preceding this, but in the volume preceding that.^

Still, one of those exercises of the communis saisiis, which are generally right, has regarded the Renais- sance of Literature in Europe as not practically be- ginning till the fifteenth century was far advanced, nay, till the various but converging influences of the capture of Constantinople, the invention of printing, the discovery of America, and the final uprising against the ecclesiastical tyranny of Rome had been successively brought to bear. And without further argument on the point of right, we may say that for the purposes of this book " The Earlier Renaissance " means the closing years of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth — the time when, the study of Greek having previously come to support and correct that of Latin in Italy, the full classical culture was transmitted from Italy herself to France and England, and so helped to install, in forms which cannot even to this day be said to have been wholly antiquated, the two greatest literatures of Europe.

It is this process — the " Italianation," as the Eliza- bethans called it, of France and of England — which forms for History the central interest of the period, ^ See The Faurieenth Century.

PREFACE. Vll

and therefore of the volume. As regards Italy herself the interest is somewhat less — great as are some of the names that have to be mentioned as Italian. Such minority is almost necessarily implied in the mere fact of such influence itself, which is, in ac- cordance with a general law, never fully exerted abroad till the forces producing it have passed their first period of energy at home. Ariosto is great — his greatness has been, I think, of late years rather in- sufficiently acknowledged by critics. But it is only necessary to compare him, I do not say with Dante (for the First Three are not in comparison save as standards), but with such a far lower kind of genius as Boccaccio's, to see that the stationary state, if not exactly the age of decadence, has been reached. The poet of the Orlando is, indeed, as much greater in individual gift than Boccaccio as he is lesser than Dante ; but he wants " the wild freshness of morning," the relisli of the quest, the closeness to nature and life. His luxuriant imagination turns at times and in parts to the lower, the secondary kinds of literature, to burlesque and grotesque. Compare him again with Spenser, his debtor certainly, though hardly his imi- tator, and the difference of a falling and a rising tide of poetry will be easily seen.

Of the other literatures German presents a problem engagingly interesting in character and most conveni- ently limited in extent — the problem of discovering why the triple influence of Greek and Latin and

VUl PREFACE.

Italian failed to do for her what it did for English and for French ; while the companion but different problem of Spanish has been already dealt with in Mr Hannay's volume.^ The rest require only very slight treatment.

On the other hand, we have in this period, more than in most, the interest of certain general divisions, departments, or kinds of literature which are peculiar to none of the languages, but appear in all. The first of these is the New Drama ; the second, the Eevival of Criticism; the third, that of Latin writing, which is really literature. This last we have here almost for the last time, and in a more considerable degree than in any volume of our history save that dealing with the Dark Ages, when most of the vernaculars were unborn. It may be questioned whether any man of our time, except Ariosto and Eabelais, has the literary value — intrinsic as distinguished from influential and symptomatic — of Erasmus, and Erasmus is nothing if not a Latinist. The allotment of the first and the longest chapter in the volume to this phenomenon may therefore not seem excessive.

The bibliography of the subject is enormous — to give it in any detail would quite overload the notes. Almost every recent German writer seems addictus jurare in verha of L. Geiger, Renaissance und JIumanismits in Italien und Deutscliland. For Italy, the names of Gregorovius, Burckhardt, Villari, and

^ See The Later Jienaissance.

PEEFACE. IX

many others need no mentioning, save to those who are not likely to take an interest in them. For France, MM, Darmesteter and Hatzfeldt's Scizieme SiMe en France (Paris, 1878), though it takes the unpretentious form of a collection of extracts for students, with introductions and notes, is one of the very best pieces of literary-historical work that have been produced for many a year and decade.

It so happens, however, that as regards great part of the subject we need not go beyond English for text-books of quite exceptional excellence both in information and original power. To Eoscoe, who led the way some century ago with his still famous Leo the Tenth and Lorenzo de' Medici, there is doubtless due the credit not merely of having produced these capital works, but of having stimulated his country- men to follow in his steps. A little later the name of Hallam is to be mentioned with the usual and thoroughly deserved praise for width and co-ordina- tion of knowledge, and for the constant endeavour to maintain a judicial attitude ; but also with the usual caution as to the defects of his qualities, shown in his absence of enthusiasm, his distrust of anything ab- normal or extravagant, and as to his necessary ignor- ance of much that is now easily accessible.

Mr Symonds' well-known Benaissance in Italy, nearly half of which is devoted to our subject, is both peccant and virtuous in exactly opposite kinds: his fluency and exuberance of language contrasting with

X PREFACE.

Hallam's measured dignity as his engouement and excess contrast with Hallam's rigid justice. But I am bound to say that the more I know of the subject, tlie better, with some important allowances, do I think of T/ie Renaissance in Italy. With regard to France, Mr Arthur Tilley's most promising intro- ductory volume,^ now sixteen years old, has unfortu- nately never been followed up ; but as an Introduction it is excellent. As for German, Professor Herford's Literary Relations of England and Germany (Cam- bridge, 1886) is one of tlie most thorough of English literary monographs, and has a far wider bearing on the general subject than its title would necessarily indicate. Mr Fronde's Erasmus, with the usual de- fects which infuriate pedants against its author, has, in measure hardly affected at all by age, that author's qualities of artistic-historic grasp, of vivid presentment, and of admirable style ; while Mr Seebohm's earlier Oxford Reformers has stood the test of examination by more than a generation of specialists with almost unsurpassed success.

He who, not being a specialist all round, enters a province so infested with vigorous specimens of the kind, carries his literary life more than usually in his hands. I found, indeed, when I was arranging this series, that more than one actual specialist was too mucli afraid of the others, in the subdivisions of the period not specially his own, to venture upon it. So

• The Literature of the Fnench Renaissance. Cambridge, 1885,

PREFACE. XI

it fell to the Editor to undertake the adventure ; let him at least hope to emerge from it an Eckius not too much dedolatus}

I should, in conclusion, like, now that tlie History of which this volume is the seventh has gone so far on its way, to point out, if it be not improper, tliat neither this volume nor any other of the series to which it belongs aims primarily at being what I have seen its predecessors sometimes called in reviews, a " text - book," a scholastic or academic manual. It is, as was fully explained in its general prospectus, and as should have been evident to any careful reader of any of its volumes, an attempt to do, with the enormous additional material which has accumulated during great part of a century, what Hallam did with the very much smaller resources at his disposal; and to do it by more hands than one, because no single hand could well suffice. It is, in- deed, hoped that, in whole or in part, it may be of service, and very great service, to students of litera- ture in statu pwpillari ; but that is not its sole nor even its main purpose. It is principally intended to perform for the educated and intelligent reader the same function which a historical atlas of the better kind performs for him in another department — to give a connected, a critical, and a comparative view of the Literature of Europe. And while its several volumes have been planned so as to be reasonably complete in

1 Vide infra, p. 99.

Xll PREFACE.

themselves, they, like the several maps of such an atlas, are necessarily interdependent, and complemen- tary of each other.

I must acknowledge very particularly the assistance I have received in this volume from Mr Gregory Smith, who read my proofs with the greatest profit to me.

Edinbubqh, August 1901.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM.

Reasons for beginning with this subject, and for the space devoted to it — The position and history of Humanism in 1500 — The accomplishment of the earlier Humanists in classics — Their relation to the vernacular — Work of the Humanists of the late Fifteenth century in both — Humanism in relation to the North- ern vernaculars — Instances of the Colloquies, the Utopia, &c. — Distribution of the subject — Latin verse in Italy — Politian — Pontanus — Vida — Fracastoro— Sannazar — Bern bo — Sadoleto ^Castiglione — Navagero — Flaminio — Molza and others— Tlie Quinque Poetce Iletrusci and the Anthology of Ubaldini — Transalpine Latin verse : France — Johannes Secundus and his imitators — Other Latin verse: German — English — Buchanan — His prose — The Psalms and their Dedication — The De Sphcera — The minor poems — Later Latin poetry — Macaronic verse — Folengo — His life — And minor works — The Zanitonella — The Baldus or the Macaronea itself — Latin Prose-writing — Erasmus — The Colloquies — Their relation to the future novel — The Encomium Morice — More : the Utopia — The EpistolozOh- scurorum Virorum — Eckius Dedolatus — ^The Facetice — Letters

XIV CONTENTS.

CHAPTER 11.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO.

Italian literature, c. 1500 — The Italian literary temper — Ariosto — His life — His work: the minor poems — The Orlando — Its qualities as romance — Desultoriness — Its sarcasm and licence — Brilliancy of style and verse — Story-character — Of Italian romance generally — Italian humour — Both as in Ariosto — Scenes, persons, and passages — Ariosto's rank as poet, and as mirror of his time — Ariosto and Rabelais — Other epic-romances — LjTics : Sonnets, La Casa — Madrigals and Canzoni — Ariosto — Michelangelo — Molza — Vittoria Colonna — Guidiccioui — Italian Didactic and Blank Verse — The Capitoli, &c. — Prose- writers — Machiavelli and Guicciardini — Minor historians — The Novellieri — Bandello — Cinthio — Firenzuola and Grazzini — Straparola — Miscellaneous prose : Letters, Dialogues — Aretino — Miscellanies of Gelli, Firenzuola, Berabo, Varchi, Caro — Castiglione and The Courtier ..... 103

CHAPTER III.

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD.

Some backwardness in the French Renaissance — The Rhetoriqueur school — The artificial forms of poetry — The Italian influence — Sub-periods— Minor writers of the early sixteenth century — Collerye, Bouchet, Jehan du Pontalais— Clement Marot — His life — Character and importance of his poetry — The Psalms and other work— Rabelais — The problem of him— His life — Gar- gantua and Pantagrvel — Their general form and scheme — Fantastic notions on the subject — Really a satirical criticism of life— Comparative quality of the satire— The style — Short running commentary — General remarks — Calvin— Value of the InstitxUion in style — Minorities of the mid-century — Mar- guerite de Valois— The HejJtameron — Bonaventure des Periers —The Nouvelles Recreations— The Cymbalum ^fwndi- Mellin de Saint-Gelais — Magny, Tahureau, Louise Labe . . 176

CONTENTS. XV

CHAPTER IV.

THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.

Opening and general character of the period in England— Causes of these — In language, grammar, and metre — In prose style — In drama —More — Elyot — Theological polemic — Latimer — The translators and liturgists — Puzzles of their work — Its iinsur- passed literary quality — The Cambridge prose-men — Cheke — Wilson — His Art of Rhetoric — "Ink-horn terms" — Ascham — The position and work of Wyatt and Surrey — Their poetic value — Their models and masters — Their means and methods — The English sonnet — The "Poulter's Pleasure," &c. — Blank verse — Some others — Tusser and Heywood — The Proverbs and Epigrams ....... 231

CHAPTER V.

THE GERMAN VERNACULAR.

Poverty of German not quite intelligible but certain — The exploit of Luther — General characteristics of his writings — His prose — His verse — Ulrich von Hutten — Hans Sachs — His literary character — The Fabeln und Schwdnke — The Fastnachtspiele— Miscellaneous light literature— Volkslkder — Bprrjreihen — Goedeke and Tittmauu's Liederbuch .... 284

CHAPTER VI.

THE CHANGES OF EUROPEAN DRAMA.

The two influences — Their limited working in Italy — Early Italian tragedy — Early comedy: its distinguished practitioners — Bibbiena — Aretino — Ariosto— Machiavelli — General style of their plays — Grazzini, Cecchi, &c. — The artificial Latin jilay — In France— Buchanan's tragedies — In High and Low Germany — Volder's A colastus — Birck's Susanna — The A luta and liebelles of Macropedius — Kirchmayer's Pammachius — Vernacular

XVI CONTENTS.

drama fti France — Gringore — Other drama — The farces-j-Mys- teries and moralities — Drama in England — ^The interlude — John Hey wood — His pieces — Some other interludes — John Bale — Kyng Johan — Its position as first of Chronicle Plays —And in itself 321

CHAPTER VII.

THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM.

The Middle Ages necessarily uncritical — The Kenaissance neces- sarily critical but with limitations — Character and reasons of these — The actual rise and progress of Italian criticism — Its far-reaching importance, and connection with the formation of modern literature — Upshot of it — Vida — Lilius Giraldus — Giraldi Cinthio — J. C. Scaliger — His Poetic — Castelvetro — His ideas on drama and epics ..... 373

CHAPTER VIII.

THE MINOR LITERATURES — CONCLUSION.

Norse — The Danish Ballads — Dutch Rederikers — The Slavonic lan- guages : Hungarian — The age not specially an age of reason — The importation of the old and development of the new^- Other inHuences East and West — The Reformation — The great work, the fashioning of the vernaculars : achievements and illustrations — In Latin — In vernacular — Its lack of the highest charm — The compensations — The chief accomplisliment . 399

INDEX 419

THE EAELIEE EENAISSANCE.

CHAPTEE I.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM.

REASONS FOR BEOINNINO WITH THIS SUBJECT, AND FOR THE SPACE

DEVOTED TO IT THE POSITION AND HISTORY OF HUMANISM IN

1500 — THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE EARLIER HUMANISTS IN CLASSICS — THEIR RELATION TO THE VERNACULAR — WORK OP THE HUMANISTS OF THE LATE FIFTEENTH CENTURY IN BOTH — HUMAN- ISM IN RELATION TO THE NORTHERN VERNACULARS — INSTANCES OF THE 'COLLOQUIES,' THE 'UTOPIA,' ETC. — DISTRIBUTION OF THE SUBJECT — LATIN VERSE IN ITALY — POLITIAN — PONTANUS — VIDA — FRACASTORO — SANNAZAR — BEMBO — SADOLETO — CASTIOLIONE — NAVAGERO — FLAMINIO — MOLZA AND OTHERS — THE ' QUINQUB POET^ HETRUSCI ' AND THE ANTHOLOGY OP UBALDINI — TRANS- ALPINE LATIN VERSE : PRANCE — JOHANNES SECUNDU3 AND HIS IMITATORS — OTHER LATIN VERSE : GERMAN — ENGLISH — BUCHANAN — HIS PROSE — THE PSALMS AND THEIR DEDICATION — THE ' DB SPH-ERA' — THE MINOR POEMS — LATER LATIN POETRY — MACARONIO VERSE — FOLENGO — HIS LIFE — AND MINOR WORKS — THE ' ZANITON- ELLA' — THE 'bALDUs' OR THE 'mACARONEa' ITSELF — LATIN PROSE- WRITING — ERASMUS — THE 'COLLOQUIES' — THEIR RELATION TO THE

A

2 EUROPEAN LITERATUllE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

FUTCRK NOVEL — THE 'ENCOMIUM MORI^' — MORE: THE ' UTOPIA ' — THE ' EPISTOL^ OBSCURORUM VIRORUM ' — * ECKIUS DEDOLATUS ' — THE 'faceup' — LETTERS.

Jn beginning this volume with a chapter on the Latin writings, prose and verse, of the period with which it Reasons/or deals, not without a certain glance before beginning with and after at other work of the same class,

thn subject, and •. • . n i

for the space de- it IS not nccessarj to prefix many general voted to it. remarks. But it would be improper to prefix none. In no other of the volumes of this History of Ettropean Literature, except the second, has a special chapter been, or will one be, devoted to Latin writing. And here as there, though to a somewhat less degree, an apology is required for the comparative brevity of the treatment of the subject. Not merely a whole volume, but half-a-dozen volumes might very well be devoted to Latin literature from the fifth to the eighteenth century ; for it was not till the latter was far advanced that literature, except of the technical kind or representing the mere pastime of scholars, ceased to be written in the universal language. And it is doubtful whether any one, except some accidental specialist, would now be competent to write them. In fact, Dr Johnson was probably the last great man of letters in any part of Europe who can be said to have been actually fitted for the task. On the other hand, such a book, when written, would, in regard to most of the periods, be very much of a work of super- erogation, or at the best a history of curiosities ; and it would certainly discuss, outside of philosophy and reliiiion and a few other divisions of the literature of

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 3

knowledge, very few books of really great merit. We have not omitted, and shall not omit, to notice the greater Latin work, whether in the literature of know- ledge or in that of power, whensoever it presents itself. But the occasions requiring such notice have been and will be few.

At the junction of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- turies, however, as at the junction of the twelfth and thirteenth, the case is altered. Here as there, though for different reasons and with different results, a much greater contingent of positive literary genius turned itself into the channel of Latin writing. In each case the original cause was no doubt the existence — partly explicable, partly not — of an unusual amount and force of this literary genius, which in the earlier period applied itself to hymn -verse, scholastic philosophy, the flower of Latin mediaeval history, stories and mis- cellanies of all sorts, simply because the vernaculars were not ready to receive it fully. In our present period a similar " spate " of genius and of learning found its way into the Latin channel for reasons equally obvious but not quite so simple. The ver- naculars (with the single exception of Italian, unless we add Spanish) were indeed still not quite fully ready, yet they undoubtedly might have been, and perhaps^ ought to have been, made sufficiently available. But the New Learning had brought about a partly ex- cusable contempt of these vernaculars ; it had pro-

^ I say perhaps, remembering that the practice of Humanists la Latin invariably did much to perfect the vernaculars that they despised.

4 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

vided men with tempting patterns, as they thought, for all the possible literary styles, and in reality for many of them. Besides this, there was the subtle and not dishonourable temptation to appeal, not to the limited audience of a single tongue and country in a fashion which the choicer spirits even of that country would sincerely or affectedly disdain, but to a Euro- pean Areopagus in its own curial speech. There- fore in these two periods, and in that before us most of all, we must pay to modern Latin an attention which would elsewhere be superfluous.

Purists in the subject sometimes call attention to the fact (as it seems to them) that by the beginning of the Sixteenth century, if not by the end of the Fifteenth, the work of Humanism proper was nearly or quite done. The work of the labourer generally is done, as far as all but ingathering is concerned, when the harvest comes ; and the caution, though it may be advantageous in some respects, is superfluous in others. Humanism in at least one sense may be taken to mean, on one side the attempt almost to limit literature to Greek and Latin in the past, on the other to employ Latin and even to some extent Greek, always with preference, and sometimes with scorn of anything else, as a vehicle for literary re- daction in the present and for the future. And this Humanism had not, up to nearly the end of the Fifteenth century, produced any original literature of even the slightest importance in combined matter and form. Nobody, I suppose, considers Petrarch's Africa such a work : Boccaccio's De Genealogia Deoruni, in its

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 5

later part at anyrate a work of the highest interest in substance, might be in any language for any advantage that it derives from the language it actually uses. As for the Fifteenth century proper, its one great Latin book, the Imitation, is in thought and in form irreconcilably opposed to Humanism : the spirit of both can enter no house of the soul save by casting that of Humanism utterly out. On the other hand, the great books of revived classical Latin, or would-be classical Latin, on the Humanist side — the Colloquies, the Epistolce Obscurorum Virorum, the Utopia — are all books of the Sixteenth century ; and the first half of that century, our own more special period, probably produces more such Latin literature of the first and second class than all other periods from the Fif- teenth century to the Nineteenth put together. The course, therefore, of giving Humanist literature a special place here, and even glancing backwards and forwards a little to make the survey of it complete, has almost every justification.

That Italian Humanism, from which all other varieties were to spring more or less immediately. The position draws its fount and origin, as such things o/"w™L go» from Petrarch, is an accepted datum of t?ii5oo. literary history which need not be attacked or denied. It is, indeed, necessary here as else- where to repeat the warning (so constantly neglected by literary historians, yet so necessary for the literary historian to keep as a sign upon his hand and as a frontlet between his eyes) that such things never really come from an individual — that they are winds of the

6 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

spirit blowing no man knows whence, dews of heaven sinking into the earth and reappearing as streams no man knows how. All that we can in such cases justly say is that one man seems to trim his sail before others to the breeze, to hold his pitcher before others to catch the stream. Petrarch certainly does appear to deserve this credit in the present instance. His Latin work has been considered in some detail in an earlier volume of this History ,i and we need not repeat the consideration. Boccaccio's, a little later in date, is also rather different in kind. It is much less am- bitious in form and much fuller of fact. But both agreed in that eager and almost ferocious quest for the actual writings of antiquity, as to which all sane critics are agreed that it was the work which Human- ism had to do, and the work which it is chiefly to be thanked for doing. And putting the points in which they agreed together with the points in which they differed — that is to say, Plutarch's quest for Latin style and Boccaccio's for Latin and Greek knowledge — they may be said between them to have very nearly exhausted all that Humanism had of good in germ if not in fulness, with the exception of the purely critical side, which neither shows. To recover and make sure of the riches of antiquity ; to understand them ; to copy them as far as was possible — these were the aims of these two great men. Petrarch at least showed something of the coming folly of despising his mother tongue, or affecting to despise it ; but it was not really possible for the author of the Rime to do

^ The Fourteenth Centtiry, p. 247 sq.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 7

this seriously, and so long as he was the author of the Rime it did not much matter whether he was serious or not. He and Boccaccio between them gloriously continued the work of Dante in verse, while Boccaccio extended it in the direction of prose, so far as the vernacular was concerned. What they also did in reference to the learned languages was therefore pure gain in every respect.

Not so much can be said of their successors, the travelling scholars and lecturers who represent the first three-quarters of the Fifteenth century.^

Although it has been generally admitted that these Humanists of the main body did not, as a rule, deserve very well of their mother tongue, yet their services in assuring, not merely to their own age but to all future time, the possession of the inestimable treasures of antiquity have been justly counted to them as more than counterbalancing righteousness. And they have also appealed to the natural appetite for picturesque contrast, and to other appetites not quite so respect- able. The notion of these scholars — wandering first over Italy and then over Europe ; rising by their own efforts from the position of penniless nobodies, destitute in many though not in all cases of birth, breeding, or wealth, to that of the familiar and honoured com- panions of princes and prelates ; marrying beautiful, rich, and well-born damsels; allured from state to state and city to city by golden bribes ; setting out in quest of the buried treasures of learning like knights

^ For their relation to the vernacular see The Transition Period, p. 118 sq.

8 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

of adventure; helping to despatch generation after generation of neophytes, often from half - barbarous nations, to spread learning and the appreciation of beauty all over Europe ; honoured in their deaths with stately monuments, and rewarded by posterity for no few generations not merely as good workers in their day and way, but as men of genius and public bene- factors,— all this has excited interest neither unnatural nor ungenerous, though perhaps sometimes a little uncritical. Even their much more questionable vir- tues, and their quite unquestionable vices, have also made them interesting. The ludicrous vanity and the cat-like quarrelsomeness which distinguished most of them have not been disagreeable to that somewhat morbid taste for " curiosities of literature," " quarrels of authors," and the like, which undoubtedly does exist in many persons. It is to be feared that the licence, conventional or sincere, of their sentiments and language has not been without a certain attractive effect in some cases. And the devotees of free-thought have not failed to celebrate them as " champions of the modern spirit," as having " vindicated the rights of the human soul," and all the rest of the well-known cant of anti-cant.

We have here, fortunately, nothing to do with free- thought, or the rights of the spirit, or any other of the regalia and paraphernalia of this kind of craft or mystery. We have not much, but something (for it is a distinctly literary feature), to do with the peculi- arities which make the lighter work of Beccadelli and Filelfo, of Politian and Pontanus, so exceedingly

THE HARVEST- TIME OF HUMANISM, 9

" curious," in the bibliographical sense of ■ that adjective. With the position of the Humanists in literary history and the value of their work as litera- ture, we have a very great deal to do.

It is admitted that till we come to the extreme end of the century, the intrinsic value of Humanist work, vernacular or Latin, is exceedingly small, while its critical attitude to literature shows no advance, and even some falling off, from that of the Middle Ages. In regard to the first head, the Facetiae of Poggio and the Euryalus and Lucretia of ^neas Sylvius are not exactly great literature, yet it would be difficult to say what better things the early and middle divisions of the century produced. With regard to the second, Vittorino da Feltre, one of the best of the whole school, is admitted to have been the first, and was apparently for a long time almost the only, teacher who was himself alive, and who endeavoured to make his pupils alive, to the differences of style and kind in the writers of antiquity.

But, it is said, they gained the classics for us and made them known. If this were wholly, as it is Tu accbmpiuh- partly true, and if it were the whole of

^ntoftUear. ^^^ ^^^^-^ ^^^^^ ^^^j^ ^^ j-(.j.jg ^^ nothiug iter Humanists ' "

in classics. morc to Say. But, in the first place, the actual recovery and publication of MSS. was a small part of the work of the Humanists of 1375-1475 ; in the second, a great deal more was previously known than is sometimes allowed ; in the third, the credit is at least not less, perhaps more, due to the princes and merchant-princes who would have these things, than

10 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

to the scholars, who were often little more than their commercial travellers or collectors ; and in the fourth, considering the general trend of thought in all coun- tries, the thing would pretty certainly have been done if these particular men had not done it. But let us grudge them no possible credit for what they did do in this way.

They cannot, it may be feared, be said to have done very much in others. Aided by, and aiding, the fash- ion, they were no doubt sometimes good, and always more or less useful, teachers ; but there are good and useful teachers in all times, and the office, alas ! is seldom more than that of the unprofitable servant, who does but what it is his duty to do. They were not, as a rule, good grammarians, and were scarcely ever good critics ; and if it be said that it is ungener- ous to blame them for this, let it be remembered that if they had spent on real study half the time that they wasted on vain jactation, and idle quarrelling, and the composition of indecent verses, they might have made themselves very good grammarians, and much better critics than they were.^

But the chief mistake and tlie greatest error of the

• I should like to except Laurentius Valla (1406(7)-1457) from

most, not all, of the strictures in this context. Valla appears to have had not a few of the defects of cliaracter of his congeners, and he has benefited rather plus cequo by tlie tendency which Heterodoxy even more than Orthodoxy has to justify all her children. But his work on Thucydides cannot but receive high admiration, when the time and circumstances are considered ; his conception of Latin style was far beyond his age, and, for the matter of that, beyond most ages ; and altogether he was a critic and a scholar of no ordinary kind, though, perhaps, not a man of letters in the very best sense.

THE HAKVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 11

Humanists, when tried before the high court of serene" ^^ . , ^. historical criticism, is the enormous waste

Tneir relation _ _ '

tothever- of their energies on Latin translation of Greek. It is true that it was the most paying work that they, as working men of letters, could undertake ; but this excuse, though valid up to a point, is not valid beyond that point. It is true also that though, in the reluctant epigram extorted from a defender of theirs, these translations " were done for the most part by Greeks who had an imperfect know- ledge of Latin and by Italians who had not complete mastery of Greek," it would be really ungenerous to lay much stress on this. The important point, from the literary point of view, is that a translation from Greek into Latin could at most do good to the man who made it by improving his own knowledge of the two lan- guages, was but too likely to hinder the study of Greek itself, and could hardly fail to produce the impression that the matter of Greek, and not its literary beauty, was its title to greatness.

This process of translation from Greek, not into the vernacular but into Latin, and the concomitant use of Latin itself for original or quasi-original composition, not only could do little or nothing for the progress of the actual vernacular, but were even antagonistic to that progress. The process resembled in no whit the effect produced on English most of all, and on French and German to some extent, by tlie age-long practice of translation from Latin, and from modern languages, into the actual living tongue. It is to this process that English in particular owes its extraordinary wealth of

12 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

vocabulary, and the unrivalled splendour and variety which, even more than mere wealth, distinguish it. But Italian remained unenriched by any contributions of the kind. Nor could the additional familiarity with Latin itself fail to weaken as well as to refine Italian. For it was a kind of process of " breeding in and in," of pouring in more water where the water had already choked. The wonderful effect ^ of the blends of Latin and French, which were unceasingly poured into English between the eleventh and the sixteenth century, and which by the latter date had made it a not much more than recognisable descendant of the language of Caedmon and Cynewulf, is paralleled by nothing in Italian. On the contrary, the accomplished Italian of our present period is far thinner and weaker than Dante's own, though it may be more elegant ; nor does the language seem ever to have fortified itself since. The Fifteenth century was the great time of this process of fortification in all other European tongues, and the missing of the opportunity was, at least partly, the fault of the Humanists.

It may, however, be urged, with some show of reason, that at the end of the period immediately pre- ivorkofthe Ceding our own, no small atonement was

i:rf;j2nt. ^^^de. Most assuredly the great Flor-

century in both, eutiues and Neapolitans, whose vernac- ular work has been fully noticed in the preceding

• It is strange that the obstinate refusal to recognise this fact and

its consequences should still continue. But some very recent English scholarship of the philological kind seems as hopelessly blind to it aa was Guest himself.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM, 13

volume,^ — ^ueas Sylvius, Sannazar, Pontanus, Alberti, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandula, and above all Politian, — whether they write entirely in Latin, or, like Sannazar and Politian, are masters of either in- strument ; they provide literature of an accomplished kind in both classes of writing; they advance, refine, reform the literary quality.

Once more we must not deny the truth of this ; yet once more it will be difficult for even the greatest representatives of Humanism at this time to make good any very much higher claims than those secure and great ones, of having been the channels and the distributors of classical learning to countries and to individuals that could make better use of it than themselves.

For throughout — in the Utraquists as well as in the Monoglots, in Politian and Sannazar as in Piccolomini and Pontano — the fault and the mischief of the Humanist position are seen in the strange unrealities of many kinds, which mar their vernacular and their " regular " work alike. Everything is out of focus. The famous transference of the Pagan ecclesiastical dictionary to Christian use ; the employment of Jupiter Optimus Maximus to designate the divinity whose worshippers, in the very towns where the words were written, had been cast to the lions for refusing to worship the said Jupiter ; the fitting of the whole terminology of Latin ritual into the services of the Christian Church ; the sincere horror, late in our own period, of an equally sincere Christian like Lilius

^ The Transition Period, chaps, iv. and xii.

14 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

Giraldus at the person who, si Deo placet I wanted of Sannazar dictionem Christianam id est harbaram ; other well-known and often-quoted things, which it is not necessary to quote again, merely give the results of this mischief in one particular direction. The evil was, in fact, all-pervading in literature. The Latin poets themselves had gone beyond measure, and certainly far beyond the Greeks, in appropriating stock imagery, stock characters, stock phrases, to different literary kinds ; but the Humanists out-aped them twenty-fold. To the practice of this time, and to its criticism a little later (see chapter vii.) are due the "pastoral" frippery which revolted even such a sturdy Latinist and neo-classic as Dr Johnson, and which, to make it quite tolerable, requires the superhuman poetry of a Milton or a Shelley, — the tawdry and tumbled finery of the " heroic poem," with its cut-and- dried exordia and invocations, its cut-and-dried super- natural interferences, its cut-and-dried revolutions, its cut-and-dried everything. In those who did not write Italian the principle and its practice produced at best pastiche ; in those who wrote Italian as well, they produced something which was not only pastiche but patchwork. Even the great Politian, the man who really might, without much absurdity, have echoed Filelfo's absurd boast that he could write as well in Greek as in Latin, and as well in Italian as in either, suffers (at least in some judgments) terribly from this mixture, and from the sense of unreality, of the school exercise, of the copy of verses. And all the others suffer much more.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 15

The circumstances of the more northern nations in reference to the study and practice of the classical, nnmanismin especially the Latin, tongues were remark- A-'c^lw""" ably different. In the first place, no one vemamiars. of them had ready to hand a vernacular of anything like the advancement and polish of Tuscan Italian. Even French, which had not merely the most abundant but the most brilliant literature of all, — a literature with which Italian itself could only vie by restricting the competition to the greatest individuals and not admitting mass or variety of work, — was still very immature, and had, by the latter part of the fifteenth century, rather gone back than advanced. French prose in particular was behindhand, and simply did not yet exist in any form suited to the majority of modern purposes. The Germans, Low and High, had fallen off still more remarkably from the promise which Middle High German had given of poetic beauty and Middle Low of quaint originality; so that the vernacular German of our present period is, outside Luther, one of the most unliterary tongues in Europe. Indeed Latin of a kind played more of the part of "second vernacular" to Germans in the late Middle Ages than perhaps to any other people. As for English, it had had one poet (as even Italians — e.g., Lilius Giraldus — knew) of quite the first order, but it could hardly be said to have a second. The prose was behind France, and had only recently gone beyond Germany : the poetry was in a pitiable state of eclipse and disorganisation, and the very language was still in process of formation. The isolated and

16 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

peculiar offshoot of literary Scottish-English was itself a kind of grammatica, an artificial literary tongue, though with strong and racy dialect character. Pro- vencal was practically dead for literature ; and the remoter Scandinavian had also finished its long and glorious season of productiveness. The languages of the Peninsula stood, in the aspect now being con- sidered, nearly in the position of Italian. Besides, their vernacular literature is dealt with fully else- where,^ and they supplied few great Humanists.

For all the others Latin supplied in. differing de- grees, but really and to their utmost benefit, the aids which, in reference to Italian, were mistakenly and superfluously demanded of it. To all it gave a prose medium infinitely superior, for the miscellaneous pur- poses of prose, to their vernacular, and intelligible to all educated Europeans, as that vernacular could not possibly be. To all (though here the differing measure becomes very important) it supplied vehicles for those kinds of verse for which as yet their vernacular was not polished enough, or not supple enough, or insufficiently supplied with vocabulary. To all it provided models of style of admirable accom- plishment and adaptability, which (even for French to some extent, for the others to a very much greater) had the advantage of being slightly different from the native idiom and construction, and therefore of crossing, blending, strengthening, and varying that idiom's powers. And to all it gave in abundance

^ See The LaUr Renaissance.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 17

that vocabulary of terms of art, of philosophy, of literature, of business, which they lacked.

And so it comes about that while the average

fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Latin of the Northern

nations is no doubt not at all better in sub-

Instances of

</ie Colloquies, staucc, and much worse in form, than the opia, c. g^ygj,g^gg Humanist Latin of Italy, these countries were justified in using Latin, even for such average purposes, as Italy was not. They were re- warded by sometimes accomplishing in it work which they probably could not have accomplished at all in their own vernaculars, while its circulation would, in these, have been deplorably limited. Let us imagine, but for a moment, the horrible calamity that it would have been to European literature in the strictest sense, as well as to European culture in the widest, if Erasmus had written in Dutch !

This example might be almost sufficient, because everybody can appreciate it. It would not have been quite such a misfortune if he had been a French- man and had written in French, just as it is an im- mense piece of good fortune that men like Eabelais and even Marot did write in French. But French itself would not have fully sufficed for his purposes, which required the language not of Eabelais, not of Calvin, not even of Montaigne, but of Pascal or Descartes at the very earliest — that is to say, a language not reached till a full century after his time. And he would have been worse parted still with English. It is (or rather it is not quite) needless

B

18 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

to say that More never wrote a line of the Utopia in English. But it is not probable that, if he had so written it or had translated it from his own Latin, or if Aschani or any of his contemporaries had done this, it would be much better than it is in good Master Eichard Eobinson's translation, executed a few years after More's death. Yet those who have only read the English may be excused for sometimes wondering at the reputation of the book, though they may understand it when they read the Latin. In the latter case the instrument of expression is adequate to the thing to be expressed, and if not perfectly, yet sufficiently under the command of the artist. In the other it is not. Compare in a different sphere the Pammachius and its very close English ana- logue Kyng Johan ; read the Epistolce Obscuroruin Virorum, and think of what they would have been in even Murner's German. In pure poetry, indeed, the argument fails ; but then in pure poetry no in- telligent critic would ever think of applying it. Pretty, sometimes almost exquisite, as the Basia are, they would have been prettier in Italian, prettier still (Marot has actually made similar things) in French, They would have been prettier in English, and it is just possible that if the author had used his own vernacular, they might, to persons who can taste that language, be prettier in Dutch. But then poetry stands by itself, and as it happens, no vernacular in Europe, except Italian, was very strong in pure poetry at this particular time, so there cannot have been much lost.

THE HAKVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 19

But the importance, the general character, and the errors, such as they were, of this Humanist literature Distribution, of being thus dealt with, there remains the the subject. difficulty of dealing adequately with itself. Its mass, even if we were to limit ourselves to our strict period, much more if we look before and after, is enormous. To give an example, one of our modern benefactors, who has collected and selected an invalu- able sheaf (v. infra) of the Latin-German poets of the sixteenth century, observes that he thinks he has read about a thousand such. And the volume of miscel- laneous prose must be almost incalculable. Although the newly invented press lent itself with almost too much complaisance to the dissemination of the matter, the chief autliorities appear to be agreed that by far the larger part is still in MS. Even of that which was printed much lias never been reprinted, and the original editions, except in public libraries, are made inaccessible to students of moderate means by the entirely unliterary craze for such things on the part of collectors. Yet again it may be pretty freely doubted whether any one but a pure literary hedonist, with a competent fortune and his time to himself, would be justified in devoting this time to the extent necessary for this particular subject. For of almost all divisions of literature, till we come to the mere " book- making" of purely modern days, it is probably that which, in its average development, has least to satisfy not merely the intellect but even the taste. The average Humanist style is confessedly but an imitation of certain few and definite models, and the average

20 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

Humanist matter is, as confessedly, quite subordinate to tlie style. With Cicero and Livy, Virgil and Ovid, actually in our possession, it is surely the tamest of amusements, and the most light-minded of lost labours, to examine whether Henricus Pimpernellus or Johannes Napsius Grseculus Senior has come nearest to or farthest from Ovid or Virgil, Livy or Cicero. And of any story to tell, any solid thesis to prove, any knowledge to convey, even any individual and original fragment of thought to utter, Pimpernellus and Napsius are, as a rule, emulously destitute.

Fortunately there are exceptions who can be made representative, not in the sense that their constituents in any but the least degree resemble them, but in the sense that they show at the best what was actually done, and probably at the best or very nearly so what could have been done, what all these constituents would have done if they could. Some of these — Erasmus, More, the authors of the Einstolce Ohscurorum — are famous ; others are at least known to students ; others have the merit of being accessible with ease or with not much difficulty. It should be possible, by accounts of these varying with their importance, and carefully selected to cover as many departments of literature as possible, to give no inadequate idea of the whole. In two important departments. Criticism and the Drama, — to each of which, in consequence of their special eminence in this tract of country, a separate chapter is assigned, — it would be in- convenient to disjoin the Latin experts from the

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM, 21

vernacular, but we shall endeavour to deal with

the rest.

To deal at all exhaustively with even the Italian

verse which resulted from this fancy or fashion — not Latin verse c[uite, as wc have scen, so unreasonable in in Italy. {^^ Origin as unprofitable in its results —

would require a volume ; ^ but within reasonable space

it is possible to note some typical specimens of its

producers and their productions.

^ The very Ddicice Pociarum Italorum (s.l., 1608), which is the nearest approach to a Corpus of this poetry or poetastry, consists of two enormously thick volumes, one of 1400 the other of 1500 pp. Smaller collections and selections are extremely numerous ; and the odd Italian habit (which Sir Thomas Browne ought to have noticed in the Garden of Cyrus) of arranging them in quincunxes, or at least quintets, may lead to a great deal of confusion. Not merely is the disreputable Quinqiic Poctarum Lusus in Vcncrcm quite a different thing from the respectable Quinque Poetarum Uctniscorum Carmina, but the identically same title, Carmina Quinque Illustrium Poetarum, covers two quite different selections — that referred to by Mr Symonds {Revival of Learning, p. 337, new ed.), containing Politian, Bembo, Navagero, Castiglione, and Sadoleto ; and an earlier one (Florence, 1552), in wliich the places of Politian and Sadoleto are taken by Cotta and Flaminio. Pope re-edited a collection (Selecta Pocmata Italorum, 2 vols., London, 1740), giving most of Vida and Fracastoro, much of Politian, the curious De Animorum Immortalitate of Aonius Palearius, and plentiful examples of Sannazar and the minors. But perhaps the best book for a reader who does not want to do more than fairly "sample" the subject is the anonymous Pocmata Selecta Italorum (Oxford, 1808), which contains the Poetics of Vida, the Syphilis of Fracastoro, the Bcnacus of Bembo, the LaocoQn and Curtius (Oxford should have asked her nodding son, " Why Quintus, sir ? why Qidntus ? ") of Sadolet, with selections from Sannazar, Castiglione, Navagero, Flaminio, Molza, the two Amaltei, Bonfadio, Muretus, and a few minors. Unfortunately, being confined to the sixteenth century, it contains nothing from Politian or Pontanus.

22 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER EENAISSANCK

The two most famous of the poets whom, though directly belonging to the last volume ^ we borrow for the purposes and under the conventions of this chapter, are Politian (1454-1494) and Pontanus (1426-1503); for it is unnecessary, as it would be unedifying, to do more than glance at the exercitations, more impudent than interesting, of Beccadelli in his Hermaphroditiis. The others, especially Pontanus, may go near to rival him in this respect, but at any rate they have other claims. Politian, indeed, has probably been more fortunate than any writer mentioned in this chapter, except Erasmus, in saving something more than a mere vague general reputation from the devour- ing ertorts of Time on material which was fondly thought proof against the " monster of ingrati- tudes." The Nutriciay the Manto, the Amhra have been praised with discretion and judgment by Mr Symonds in our own day, and it is rather curious that not long after their own they were praised with judg- ment and discretion by Lilius Giraldus, who, as we have just seen, does not always exercise these gifts impeccably. The qualities which helped to restrain the admiration of the sixteenth-century Humanist are not improbably the same which may serve to animate that of the nineteenth or twentieth century critic. Politian's subjects — even the most literary — are to him the subjects of a real enthusiasm ; and his temper- ament and powers, which, as his vernacular work shows, were both essentially poetic, raise the blood, both of himself and his reader, far above the frigid

' Vide The Transition Period, chap. iv.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 23

level attained by Naugerius or Bembo. We can always excuse roughness when it is associated with power, and Politian can be both vigorous and sweet. Signor del Lugo's edition^ (Florence, 1867) containing some unpublished Italian prose and all the extant Latin and Greek verses, presents in more ways than one a striking picture of this typical man of the Italian Eenaissance. The word picture is doubly applicable, for it has an actual frontispiece portrait, arresting enough with the wild eyes, the extravagant Eoman nose — more of a promontory than even Southey's or Herrick's — and the head twisted half round on the wry neck as of one who sees spectres.^ But the contents of the book speak the author quite as vividly. The sermons — actual sermons — full of fervour and unction ; the virtuous pedagogic dictations to little Piero de' Medici ; and the graceful courtier - like letters to the Ladies Clarice and Lucrezia (the Italian account of the conspiracy of the Pazzi appears to be a translation by another hand) act in the most startling manner as foils to the unmiti- gated filth and blind fury of the Latin invectives against "Mabilius" — the Greek scholar Marullus — Politian's successful rival with the beautiful Alessandra Scala. These invectives^ show not only the worse side of Eenaissance manners and morals, but also the worse side from the artistic, not the ethical, point of view, of its imitation of the classics. Politian forgets

• There is said to be no edition, at once exclusive and complete, of

Politian's Latin verse. The fullest seems to be that quoted.

^ Nose and neck did not escape lampooners at the time.

^ Mr Symonds very generously allows them pungency. I fail to see it.

24 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

that even Martial, and still more Catullus, never thought it sufficient to fling at an enemy a mere hand- ful of foul thoughts, swaddled in fouler words — that, with the rarest exceptions, they put in wit as well, and generally at least managed to connect, and not merely to combine, obscenity with point. Fortun- ately such things are but a small part of the poet's exercises in " regular " verse ; and in many, if not most, of the others the poetic fire which he assuredly possessed breaks alike through the extraordinary metrical licences of the Greek (which sometimes seems to scan " politically," and not even by the technical accent) and the sometimes prim Virgilisings or Claud- ianisings of the Latin. One may probably be excused the confession of having read very little of the Latin Iliad ; but the Manto and the Anibra, the Busticus and the Nutricia, can only be missed by any one who can appreciate Latin poetry at all to his great fault and infinite loss, while some of the smaller poems are really nectareous.

Pontanus, whose prose is noteworthy as well as his verse,^ and who wrote constantly in the

Pontamis. <.t.t.

learned language, talis short or rolitian in poetic quality, but is not destitute of it. The

^ The standard of the verse is the Aldine of 1513. (There is an abundant selection in [Gruter's] Delicice : Pope gives only a few pieces.) I possess a copy of the Lyons edition of the prose a year later. The latter is not of a succulent character, consisting of two Dialogues, Charon and Antonius, both, and especially the latter, con- taining verse as well as prose, and of nearly half a score of moral or political treatises — De Fortitudinc, De Principe, De Liberalitate, &c. He also wrote History and much else.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM.. 25

error of his Urania, a long astronomical poem in five books, with extensive mythological and other digressions and episodes, is the error of the whole time and kind. It lasted, indeed, so long that there may even seem to some to be a certain impertinence and presumption in calling it an error at all. The errors of his lighter and shorter poems are in the first place tlie occasional corrupt following of the licence of the ancients — less, it would seem, as a matter of hot- blooded sympathy than as a matter of cold-blooded literary convention ; and the less odious mistake of refusing to clothe genuine Italian thought, and cele- brate characteristic Italian scenery, in native Italian verse. But in the Neapolitan, as in the Tuscan poet, there is a certain massiveness and race which we rarely find in their successors, though there is some- thing of it in their younger contemporary Sannazar.^ Notice of him, however, may be conveniently post- poned in order to discuss first tlie most solid and characteristic of the Latin verse-writers of our own special time, the poet of the Poetics and the poet of — Syphilis.

Of the critical value of Vida's ^ celebrated poem we may speak in the chapter specially devoted to criticism.

^ Not only Sannazar, but his rival in pastor-al, " Mantuan," Battista Spagnuoli (1436-1516), belongs specially to the last volume, and both have been duly noticed there. The vogue of Mantuan's Latin verse in the sixteenth century was almost incredible. Much as men worshipped Virgil, they did not hesitate to put his modern com- patriot by his side.

^ Marco Girolamo Vida, 1480-1566, bom at Cremona, died Bishop of Alba. The Scacchia, Bomhyx, and Ars Pocticvt' appeared, with some hymns, in 1527, the Christiad eight years later.

26 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

But in the case of so famous (if to modern readers, per- haps, rather dimly famous) a person ^ some- thing must be said here about its poetical and literary value. Neither, it is to be feared, even with the amplest allowance which can be made on the general principles of this chapter, can be said to be great. The mere versification of the Poetics leaves a good deal to desire ; the occasional spondaics are not well chosen or adjusted, and though the verses will run trippingly enough for a time, there is generally before long an awkward "pull-up," or a maladroit adjustment of pauses. The phraseology is in one respect a model of the kind, in another a caution against it. It is the very embodiment of the gradus : one seems to move in a sort of snowstorm of minute Virgilian, Ovidian, and other tags, sleeting, like the Lucretian atoms, through a void. For, in truth, Vida's general drift (we still reserve the critical point) is empty enough of really important sense. He invokes the Muses ; he addresses Prince Francis at Madrid, is very unhappy that his patron should be in captivity, and suggests that these Poetics may while away the captive's time. There are many kinds of verse ; choose which you like best, only remembering that everybody cannot do everything. The poetic cliild must be carefully educated, kept from bad language (in the critical sense), taught the poets, but not whipped too much. Emulation is good, but not

^ " Immortal Vida" (Pope) was edited and translated unceasingly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some half -score French versions are quoted ; the standard English one is Pitt's.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISlf. 27

precocity. As he grows up let him try easy subjects first. These commonplaces and their likes fill the first book ; for the contents of the second and third we may refer to a future page. But though there is sometimes common - sense in the meaning, there is never anything but commonplace in the expression. To different tastes (or the same taste in different moods) the Scacchia and the Bomlyx may seem less or more worthy displays of Vida's art, such as it was, than the Poetica ; but this can hardly be the case with the Christiad. This last is an application of his own principles in artificial heroic narrative, (see chap, vii.) to those rebellious subjects on which judges so different in most ways, but so alike in general neo-classic taste, as Boileau and Johnson, agree that the system was inapplicable and im- practicable, and which perhaps went nearer to wrecking Paradise Lost itself than Miltonolaters are always ready to allow. The others are merely exercises in the verse tour de force — examples of what the Greek rhetoricians called ecphrasis, elabo- rate and formal description, according to the speci- fications made and provided for such things. The taste for them continued long, and inspired, among other things, Addison's Machince Gesticulantes and Barometer. If not taken too seriously, they are a civil game enough ; and if they be of no great value in themselves, one can only grieve to think that the chief reason of their disuse is the fact that fewer and fewer persons every year go through the practice necessary to appreciate the play. The worst

28 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

of them was that they promoted similar exercises, more or less serious, in the vernacular, which have, to speak frankly, no interest at all. The Cyders and the Arts of Preserving Health and the Fleeces try the catholic spirit in literature perhaps more than any other division of literary production.

The once if not now world-famous Syphilis of

Fracastoro,! belongs partly to this class, but more to

another which is also represented in the

Fraeastoro. , , , • p i

later developments just reierred to — the class of pure didactic verse. This, though it is almost demonstrably a bad thing (except as some- times showing that poetry can be poetical in spite of everything), has of course a mighty ancestry from Hesiod in the one great house and Lucretius in the other downwards, and may plead the almost singular claim of having commended itself equally to An- tiquity, the Middle Age, the Renaissance, and the Augustan period of modernity. The kind of the De Berum Natura cannot possibly be stigmatised as a necessarily bad kind ; but it is certainly unlike Wisdom, in that it is justified of very few of its children. Fracastoro's poem, if not of the best, is anything but of the worst. What may seem to modern readers the inevitably unsavoury nature of the subject is all but entirely deodorised by the treatment. The disease presented itself to Fracas-

^ Girolamo Fraeastoro (1483-1553), Veronese physician and poet. He was a professor at Padua, and also wrote divers Latin treatises on medical and scientific subjects, as well as a remarkable critical Dialogue, Naugerius, a Joseph in hexameters, and other poems. My copy of his Opera is that in 2 vols., Lugduni, 1591.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 29

toro's contemporaries very mainly, and the poet- physician has himself treated it almost entirely, as a terrible epidemic, if not totally disconnected from any invitation by individual misconduct, yet in at least many cases quite independent of this. He is thus able to treat it, and does treat it, almost exactly as if it were smallpox or scarlet fever; and his setting forth of diagnosis, progress, and treatment is not only purely scientific but void of offence even to non-scientific readers. His medium is a hexameter which has been accused of harshness, but which may seem to some to be rather strong than harsh, and his chief concession to convention is the final story of the shepherd Syphilis (said to be the actual origin of the name). This hero is struck with the disease by the Sun, whose deity he has blasphemed, and cured by the nymph Ammerice (America) with help of the tree Hyacus (Guaiacum). On the whole, the worst thing to be said against the piece is that it could have been done much better in prose.

We may now pass to less serious things. Sannazar

(1458-1530), who belongs not less, or even more, to the

fifteenth century ^ than to the sixteenth,

Sannazar.

has received much praise for his Latin poetry. It is certain that he has something of the grace and force of Politian and Pontanus, with some- thing also of the inspiration of the former, when we compare him with the neat prettinesses or the frigid conventions of our actual period. And he is even more "correct." Thus, though he allows himself the

^ See The Transition Period, p. 146 sq.

30 EUROPEAN LITEKATUKE — EAELIER RENAISSANCE.

lesser licence of the quadrisyllable at the close of a pentameter, he is seldom guilty of the trisyllable, in which some Italians unblushingly wallow ; and his Sapphics are often very agreeable. The Villa Mer- gellina, in particular, is one of the most satisfactory pieces of occasional poetry of the particular class, and almost as much may be said of all the group of poems on the same place and its neighbourhood. For in such pieces, while we admire the grace and skill of the com- position, and are not unpleasantly reminded of our own classical studies, there is neither the tedious length nor the disparate subject of Vida's and Fracastoro's poems to annoy us, nor are we (as in the case of the former's Poetics) likely to be provoked by the contents. In no case does the unreality, which is admittedly the curse of the whole style, strike us less, though it would be rash to say that it does not strike us at all. A fuller acquaintance with San- nazar^ will not greatly increase admiration for his Latin poetry. The famous De Partu Virginia is, in spite or because of the enormous pains which he is said to have spent upon it, a frigid production ; the almost equally famous Piscatory Eclogues, by a pro- cess which would be ingenious if intended, exhibit, in the very fact of the transposition of scenery and machinery, the defects of the whole style ; and while the severer Epigrams are, even with such inviting subjects as the Borgias, singularly lacking in point,

^ My copy is the useful modern edition opening a series of Mediaeval and Modern Latin Poets, which might have been extended with great advantage (Augsburg, 1833).

THE HAKVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 31

few of those dealing with miscellaneous subjects come up to the Mergellina series.

I do not think so much can be said of Bembo/ the

most admired, perhaps, next to Politiau, of all these

Italian Latinists. His occasional obscenity,

Bembo- i> t p t ^ • •

whether or the irank or the sniggering kind, need not now much concern us. Little need be said on that vice of the age and country at all here, and what has to be said will be better said in another place. His Latin verse stands accountant to a more strictly literary charge, and one which needs no squeamishness in the discussion of it. There are very many worse poems of the style than the much- admired Benacus, and perhaps not so very many better ; but hardly any poem shows the weaknesses of the style itself more damningly. It is not very long ; the hexameters are for the most part, if not always, fluent and sonorous, and the author shows a real pupilship to Virgil, and not merely the relation of thief to victim, in the skill with which he selects and adjusts the local names of tributary or derived stream and of neighbouring city. But neither the moderate compass, nor the abundant material, nor

' Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), a Venetian of family. He became the favourite of several popes, a cardinal, Bishop of Bergamo, librarian of St Mark, and historiographer of the State of Venice. His love for Lucrezia Borgia may have been Platonic ; that for his mistress Morosina was certainly not. He was the very Coryphaeus of Ciceronianism, but his Latin prose has faded terribly. He will recur importantly in the next chapter for his vernacular work ; and not his least brilliant connection with literature is the glowing per- oration of the Corteyiano, in the style of the Phcedrus, which Castig- lione puts in his mouth.

32 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

the tempting scenery, can induce him to describe the latter in a fresh and first-hand way, without dragging in the frippery of gradus and lexicon. It would be cruel and ungallant to object to the Xyinphs, but here as elsewhere what do we want with Jupiter ? And even if Jupiter is to be passed, why drag in Bactria, and Scythia, and Thule, and Atlas, and the Caucasus, and the poor Muses once more ? And yet Bembo really loved his native North Italy, could really (as we perceive from his vernacular work) see nature and feel passion. But with him in practice, as with Vida in theory, a literary Monmouth Street is the highway to Parnassus, and nobody can be admitted to the Muses' Court without a Court-dress of old clothes. As one reads this and other poems, an old story comes to mind. There was a schoolboy once who wrote a prize poem on the prescribed subject of Superstition. The head-master — a scholar of the old school, now with God, and in his day one of the best of men and scholars — admitted that the piece was fair of its kind and duly " crowned " it, as the French would say; but he was not happy. "There's nothing in.it about the sacrifice of Iphigenia," he said mournfully ; " I had expected something about the sacrifice of Iphi- genia." Similar desires were universally prevalent on the part of readers in the sixteenth century, and the writers of Latin verses, to do them justice, were never churlish in gratifying them. The extreme oddity of the Hymn to St Stephen makes it to us a little more piquant, though the contrasts are much the same, and Bembo's elegiacs are not seldom pretty.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 33

With less elegance perhaps, and even with less of

the poetical spirit which, as has been said, we can see

in Bembo's Italian if not in his Latin,

SadoUto. ri T 1 /» -I'll

Sadolet,! so often mentioned with the priestly lover of Lucrezia, has a much greater sincerity and depth of tone. The " Laocoon " piece ^ seems to me to deserve rather higher praise than Mr Symonds gives it, and that on Marcus Curtius reinforces the impression given by its companion. Both show not merely a man who is able to think in spheres above those of the mere fribble, the mere voluptuary, or even the mere dilettante, but one who can clothe his thought in words which have a certain quiver and ring in them. That Latin has this timbre there is no question at all 3 and it is one of the justest charges to be brought against the Humanists, that, with their far greater command of the language, they so seldom brought out what the hymn -writers of the Middle Ages had not the slightest difficulty in producing. The notable author of the Courtier ^ is another

^ Jacopo Sadoleto of Modena (1477-1547) became secretary to Leo X. and Clement VII., Bishop of Carpentras, and cardinal. He wrote mainly, if not entirely, in Latin, and was one of the best of the Ciceronians, as well as one of the best men of the Italian Renaissance. His Letters are numerous and important.

^ This, like the other shorter pieces in the preceding and following paragraphs, will be found in the Poenmta Selccta Italorum noticed above.

• Baldassaro Castiglione, bom at Casatico in 1478. He was a

diplomatist of eminence in the papal service, and was much respected by Charles V.; but was long resident at the minor Court of Urbino, which he has made the scene of the Courtier {v. infra, p. 169 sq.) He died at Toledo in 1529.

34 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

Latinist in verse of whom we may perhaps think rather better than we have thought of

Castiglione. i c i •

some, and than some have thought or him. He, too, was very fond of subjects taken from or con- nected with Art — the "Cleopatra" so called, the " Cupid " of Praxiteles, the Death of Raphael ; but his best known piece is an elegy on the youthful poet Alcon. This undoubtedly had great influence on suc- ceeding pieces of the kind, including even Lycidas ; but we may, perhaps, incline the parallel between Castiglione and Milton in a somewhat different direc- tion from that which has sometimes been given to it. The weak part both of Alcon and Lycidas is the con- ventional machinery ; but this weakness is not in the Latin poem, as in the English, carried off by the blast and the fire of the poetry. There is more sincerity of personal regret felt or simulated in tlie Alcon, but the phrasing is mere classical crambe repetita ; and though the hexameters are above the level of the time, they are mere school- work beside

" So sinks the day-star," or —

" Where the great Vision of the guarded mount."

Castiglione's prettiest thing seems to me the letter from his wife Hippolyta, which, though of course sug- gested by Ovid, still rings remarkably true among the dead scraps and orts of this verse. The following lines on the absent husband's picture live and breathe most pleasantly, despite that sad arrideo : —

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 35

" Sola tuos vultus referens, Raphaelis imago Picta manu curas allevat usque meas. Huic ego delicias facio, arrideoque jocorque,

Alloquor, et tauquam reddere verba queat, Assensu nutuque mihi ssepe ilia videtur Dicere velle aliquid, et tua verba loqui." ^

Naugerius or Navagero ^ is perhaps best known for

the saying, transferred by Dryden from Martial to

Statins, that he burnt a copy of the Ko-

Navagero. . .

man epigrammatist every year to Virgil s manes. If he did so, it only proved that he was a very silly fellow ; for not only is Martial a model and captain in his own style, but that style is not in the least comparable to the style of epic, and neither the merits nor the drawbacks of any performances in the two could be arranged in competition or contrast. But the story is at least interesting as a contribution to the history of the Virgil-mania of the time. It is also fair to Navagero to say that, though he has nothing like Martial's point, his strength, or the irre- sistibly sly and sudden wit which not seldom deserves the more honourable name of humour, he has other qualities which at least distinguish him very favour- ably from the run of modern Latin poets. The Lusus, which open the collection of his Poems in the Floren- tine Carmina Quinque Illustrium Foetantm (1552), almost hide their artificiality by the extraordinary

1 Op. cit., p. 40.

^ Andrea Navagero (1483-1529), born at Venice, which he repre- sented diplomatically. He preceded Bembo in the librarianship of St Mark. Catullus, not Virgil, seems to have been his real idol.

36 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — KARLIER RENAISSANCE.

grace which has been justly compared rather to the

Greek than to the Latin Anthology. It is still all

Pan and Faimus and Amyntas, and offerings of

violets to Venus, and barkings of Hylax and the like ;

but for once the poet has " got the atmosphere," and

we are not tormented by any sense of incongruity.

The longer pieces in elegiacs and hexameters — Aeon,

Daphnis, Tolas — are able to carry their length ; and

though Navagero is not, I think, quite Sannazar's

equal at sapphics, he is often very happy with the

miscellaneous lyrical metres, especially in the chori-

ambics of

" Jam caeli reserat fores,"

and in divers heudecasyllabic essays.

Nearly two-thirds of the volume just referred to

is hlled with the work of Marcantonio Flaminio,^

of whom a very much smaller but fairly

Flaminio. , . -n i , p i

representative selection will also be found in the Oxford Anthology above quoted. Flarainio's poems are chiefly, though not quite wholly, addresses to persons — probably the majority of the celebrated Italian men and women of the time figure in his list — and they are mainly, though again not wholly, couched in Horatian metres. He can hardly be said to possess in perfection any of the qualities which have been praised as at least occasionally existing in some of his contemporaries — the descriptive elegance

^ Flaminio (1498-1550) was, unlike the writers just mentioned, merely a man of letters. He wrote a good deal on subjects both sacred and divine, and had a father and brother whose work in verse vsas published with his at Paris in 1743,

THE HAEVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 37

of Saimazar, the grave fire of Sadoleto, the veracity and nature of Castiglione, the antique grace of Nava- gero ; but he is a fair adept in all these respects. His phrase is sometimes awkward ; for instance

" Nunc mulgere mea manu capellam Lacteoque liquore membra sicca Irrigare per sestum,"

doubtless means that he drank the milk. But it liter- ally suggests the singular picture of a person watering his dry limbs with goat's milk as a shop-boy waters the pavement in front of his master's shop. Flaminio is seen at his best in the panegyrical epicede on Vittoria Colonna to Turrianus: nor, despite the un- lucky suggestion in the passage just quoted, has Mr Symonds exaggerated his pleasant love of the country and the pictures which it induces him to draw for us. Xor is he unhappy at more trifling things, such as the felicitation of himself on his verses being sung by Marguerite of Valois — the second Marguerite, less gifted than her aunt and less beautiful than her niece of the same name, but, like them, a patroness of men of letters.

The somewhat effeminate and morbid, but luscious, muse of Molza ^ shows herself not much otherwise in

^ Francesco Maria Molza of Modena (1489-1544), a man not free from vices which are reflected in his verse, but of a temper, it would seem, almost as sweet as that verse itself. He had a very learned and poetical granddaughter (1542-1617). The rest of the writers mentioned in this paragraph can be afforded no more biographical notice than their dates. The Amaltei belonged to a family specially prolific in men of letters, some half-dozen between 1460 and 1603 being noticed in even summary biographical dictionaries.

38 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

Latin than in Italian dress, though the more masculine Moiza and language does not admit quite such a sleepy others. ripeness as its daughter. Its best example in the older tongue is undoubtedly the poem, " In His Sickness to His Friends," and this ^ would be better if it were shorter. The Alcaics of Arco (1479-1546) and Capilupo (1511-1580) display not ill the idiosyncrasy of that curious metre — which is very rarely achieved in the supremest manner, but in which the execution, un- less it is quite detestable, always rewards the poet for the trouble he takes with it. Giovanni Gotta ^ is very much less successful with it, and is also a special sinner with the trisyllable at the end of a pentameter. But the Vicus Gazanus of Bonfadio (1501-1559), con- nected in subject, and no doubt composed to some extent in rivalry, with the Benacus of Bembo, is a better piece of description than its pattern, though not perhaps a better piece of metre. Nothing in the whole kind was much more popular during the neo-classic time than the De Acone et Lconilla of Girolamo Amalteo (1506-1574), which is therefore worth quoting, as it is only a quatrain : —

"Lumine Aeon dextro, capta est Leoiiilla sinistro ; Et potis est forma vincere uterque deos. Blande puer, lumen, quod habes, concede sorori ; Sic tu csecus Amor, sic erit ilia Venus."

Nor could, perhaps, that prettiness, with a touch of triviality, which is the note of so much of this verse, be better shown. Girolamo's Alcaics would be better if

^ Vide Curmina V. 111. Poet. (Florence, 1552), p. 85. 2 1479-1510 (?).

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 39

he did not rather frequently stumble over that rock of offence the third line ; but his brother, Giovanbattista (1525-1573), has left an lollas in very flowing senarii. The facility of Muretus in the same metre has ob- tained access for him to anthologies, but he will be better treated in the dramatic chapter.

The abundance of Latin verse in Italy at this period may be illustrated from two volumes ^ which appeared in successive years just about the end of it, and which, The Quinque ranging cxactly together in print and size, ZVlnZ' and all but exactly in set of page, are logyofubaidini. somctimcs found together in contemporary binding. The first is the second quincunx noted above, and contains work by Vintha, Segni, Berni, Accolti, and Varchi.2 The other contains an anthology from no less than forty different poets, including a few of those already named, but for the most part drawn from fresh sources. No very long poems are admitted, nor is there any hard-and-fast scheme of subject, so that the nearly two hundred pages of the first volume and the nearly a hundred leaves of the second must probably contain a good thousand of pieces — eclogues and elegies and epigrams, odes and addresses and epistles, the entire supellex of the occasional poet. One of the longest and most ambitious of the contents

^ Carmina V. Hctruscorum Poctarum (Florentise apud Juntas, 1562) and Carmina Poctarum Nobilium Jo. Pauli Ubaldini studio conquisita (Mediolani ap. Ant. Antonianum, 1563).

^ For Berni and Varchi see next chapter. Fahio Segni was the poet ; the better known historian was Bernardo. Cardinal Accolti (the "Cardinalis" is in the book) lived under Julius II. Of Vintha I know little or notliing.

40 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

of the miscellany is Molza's elegant, and for the writer unusually vigorous, expostulation from Catharine of Arragon to Henry VIII. This has some two hundred lines; not a few of the epitaphs content themselves with the consecrated distich.

From such a range of authors, subjects, and styles it is possible to make a judgment of the whole class of composition not less accurate, and much more clearly cut, than when the judgment is dis- tracted and the memory made blunt by turning over scores or hundreds of volumes, though the latter process is no doubt essential to the ratifica- tion of the verdict.

The perusal, however, may only strengthen the inevitable reflection on all this work, that itself does not possess the " inevitableness " assigned, sternly but not unjustly, to poetry in Wordsworth's saying. Much of it is more than passable; some of it is distinctly good. But the second quality is rare, and even the first not abundant, in the work of Francesco Vintha, who takes liberties with the order of words, abuses the trisyllabic ending disgracefully in his elegiacs, and achieves neither the pointedness of the Latin nor the unlaboured elegance of the Greek epigram. He shows, perhaps as badly as any one, the tendency of the poet of this class to become a mere copy-of- verses man, and not even to turn out his copies of verse in good condition. Fabio Segni, if not much better in matter, is far superior in form, and now and then is really elegant, especially in choriambic metres. It may seem likely to be much more interesting to

THE HAEVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 41

pass from these respectable nonentities to a real poet like Berni, and see what he can do in Latin. But the hope will be disappointed. Neither the vigour of some of his Italian things (such especially as the famous onslaught on Aretino, which would have done very well in the tongue of Catullus) nor the grace of others appears here, and Berni is particu- larly unlucky in attempts to imitate the Catullian diminutives, and the habit which the great poet of Verona has of " turning the word " and playing on it in a fashion of quasi - refrain.^ The few epigrams of Benedetto Accolti (1497-1549) are conventional to desperation — on Pan and the Nymphs, on Innocence and Sleep, on stock fancy personages, or rather names, like Lycoris and Lycon. Of the quintet the best appearance is made, as might perhaps have seemed likely, by the variously tried literary craftsmanship of Varchi, which approves itself here also very fairly; yet even here it is difficult to single out any one piece for special praise.

The more numerous and more selectly represented contents of Ubaldini's book promise better entertain- ment. The elegiacs of Annibale della Croce have some merit. But why should a man, if the whole style did not tempt to triviality, think it worth while to turn " Donee gratus eram " into a longer metre, changing the names and a few of the words, but keeping as much as possible ? ^ Aonio Paleario, who is better

^ See especially Be Glyce, Cam. V. Hctr. Poet., p. 127. ^ See Carm. Poet. Nohil., f. 6, Horatiana Jmitatio (Cruceii et Lyces Dialogus). The metre is elegiac.

42 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCK

known for mystic strains, attempts ^ an epithalamium for Niccolo Marino and Luisa Mendoza, and hashes up the old clicMs of the subject with the utmost coolness ; indeed much of this and his other work is mere cento. There is a touch of poetry, though no great correctness, in Antonio Marino's - iambic di- meters to the Evening Star ; but Tebaldeo of Ferrara (f. 25, V.) oversteps the bounds of the most indul- gent Humanism in his echo-verses. Some of these may excite a momentary terror as one thinks what would have been the results, not so long ago, to the English schoolboy if he had ventured to send up such lines as —

" ^stiis non facit hoc spes moriens ? Oriens," or —

" Orem animo exanimi pestiferam ] .^stiferaru,"

which is near nonsense without the context, and not very much farther off with it. The "Aeon and Leonilla" epigram quoted above is here given (f. 29, v.) to Basilio Zanoni of Bergamo. Molza's coaxing verses of consolation (f. 37) to the Spanish courtesan Bea- trice on the loss of her hair are exceedingly pretty, though rather for their good-natured and affectionate tone than for any great neatness of execution. The fine poem to Henry VIII. above noticed, and the

^ See Carm. Poet. Nobil., f. 17. Antonio della Paglia or Aonius Paleariua ( ?-1570) was one of the school of Itahan semi-Pro- testants, but escaped the fate of some of them. His chief work is also in our kind, the long Latin poem De Imniortalitate Aniinorum which appears in Pope's collection, and has been praised rather beyond its deserts.

=« Ibid., f. 25 r. 24.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 43

still finer Ad Sodales, also referred to, give him by far the best position in the whole volume. This last- mentioned piece, written in his last days, with its regrets at the absence from his death-bed of the wife whom he had himself deserted, and its resigned and modest hope of some memory, is really touch- ing. The Odes of Capilupo " intend " rather more than they achieve, and the verses of Geronimo Salina to the luckless Juana of Aragon apply the " Spanish ampulla" with more freedom than success. The verses of La Casa, which hold with Molza's the chief place in the book, surpass them in elegance, though the enigmatic bishop does not, like Molza, show in his Latin verse the same qualities as in his Italian. But La Casa is here very inadequately represented.

From him, however, and from his countrymen we

must pass northwards to take a glance, since we

, . cannot give more, at the Latin versification

Transalpine .

Latin verse— of morc inclemcut climes.^ Two writers, born not merely beyond the Alps but on the shores of the Northern Sea, long divided, and one still deserves, the repute of surpassing any Italian of their own time in skill of this kind. France had no poets of the class as yet to pit against Buchanan (who was indeed almost a Frenchman by domicile) and Johannes Secundus ; but she could not lack versifiers,

• The almost appalling industry of Gruter followed up the Belie.

Poet. Hal. {v. 8uj)ra) with 3 vols, of Gallic (1609), 6 of German (1612), and 4 of Belgic (1614) poets in Latin. One of the German vols, has 1700 pp.

44 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

and some of them were of note. The uiilucky printer- lexicographer Etienne Dolet (1509-1546), whose ex- cellent biographer, the late Mr Christie, has made him better known in England than, save by Mr Christie's own means, he would have been to his own country, wrote verse of some merit in his general Car- Ttiina (Lyons, 1538) and the Genethliacum Clcmdii Fili next year ; Theodore Beza (1519-1605), a Burgundian by birth, if a Swiss by enforced residence, owes a some- what parti-coloured fame to his Juvenilia (Paris, 1548) ;

and Daurat ( ?-1588), a star of the Pldiade itself,

darted Latin rays rather more willingly and success- fully than French, while the list might be very largely extended. But the seventeenth rather than the six- teenth century was the palmy day of French Latin verse.

The most graceful beyond all question of Renaissance

Latin writing is to be found in the famous and widely

imitated Basia ^ of Johannes Nicolaus Secun-

Johannes Secun-

dusandhis dus. Thcsc are thought to have been ad- dressed to a Spanish beauty between 1534 and the author's death two years later, and they appeared in 1539. The learned pains which have been spent on tracing their strain afar ofip to the Greek Anthology and Catullus, and more immediately to

1 The recent handy edition of the Basia, with a few of the immediate originals and imitations, by Herr Elliuger (BerUn, 1899), is a monu- ment of German industry in its discussion of parallelisms, &c., but also a less admirable model of German abstinence from criticism proper, and even from an account, however succinct, of the author. The other work of Secundus, which will be found in the DelicicE Poetarum Belgicorum, iv. 147 sq., is mostly inferior to the Basia.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 45

Beroaldus and otliers, might have been spared. The lips of Nea?ra were probably quite sufficient to inspire her lover. But he has put the universalities of the subject with such a combination of scholarship and fire that no doubt he was imitated. There has been an occasional tendency, especially of late years, to sneer at the Basia as frigid and vapid. They are really nothing of the sort. A Dutchman, writing in the ghost of a language, was not likely to attain to quite the vividness in different ways of his contemporary Marot's En la haisant, or of some of our own Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline pieces in the next generation or the next century. But the verses of Secundus are not mere literary exercises ; flesh and blood as well as ink and paper have taken part in their production. Though quite decent, as the author, for once violating decency, himself protests, they are not in the least dull ; and the way in which these things should, contrasted with the way in which they should not, be written about may be seen very well by contrasting almost any one of the Basia with La Casa's Capitolo del Bacio, one of the least offensive of its class. The splendid conclusion of the Eighth —

" O vis superba formae ! "

is not quite equally led up to ; indeed the Anacre- ontic in Latin is apt to take a kind of staccato touch. But the hendecasyllabics of the Fifth —

" Dum me mollibus hinc et hinc lacertis " —

are quite delightful, while they are remarkably free

46 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

from clichJs, " lubricus vultus " being almost the only importunate reminiscence. The opening piece —

" Cum Venus Ascanium super alta Cythera tulisset,"

though very pretty and possessing that pictorial quality in which the better Latin poetry of the time often sets a good example to the rising vernaculars, has less individual quality ; and the metre of the second, Horatian though it be, is not so well suited to the subject as some others ; while the third, aiming at quasi-epigrammatic form, shows us the poet rather "stumbling in paths of alien art." But the Seventh —

" Centum Basia centies " —

again sets tune and words in perfect accordance, and its subject-conceit (the quarrel of the eyes and lips because the eyes cannot see what the lips are kissing) is carried out with the daintiest and most suitable ripple of rhythm and phrase. The Alcaic stanza of the Ninth is rather too stately for these delicate transports : the elegiacs of the following piece, and of others, are far more in harmony. But tempting though it be, one must not mention all, where almost all are good. It is, however, quite worth while to turn over the examples and imitations which Herr Ellinger has subjoined in order to see what a prince of his class was this poet whom the gods took ere Nesera's kisses were dry. The Osculum PantJiice of Filippo Beroaldo (1453-1505), which some would have to be his original, is long, verbose, frigid, and stuffed with classical -dictionary matter. The

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 47

Ad Ncceram of Tetrus Crinitus, though better, has none of the liquid fire of Johannes, nor has Sannazar's Nina. Among the imitators Buchanan is simply not to be mentioned; and though Bone- fonius deserves a little better of his Pancharis and Muretus of his Margaret, Secundus is left without another second.

For German-Latin verse of our period two recent volumes ^ will give us an excellent text. There was, other Latin as has been already hinted, no subject for verse-German, ^hjch ^^g j^ew Latin was more used, nor was there any perhaps for which it was better suited, than for occasional poetry. The second of the volumes cited contains a selection of " poems of places," the chief devoted to Nuremberg and em- bellished with interesting " cuts " by or after Diirer ; the first is a more varied selection from a much vaster body of amatory and miscellaneous lyric. Eobanus Hessus, who has sometimes been regarded as the best poet of this class, figures in both, and in the Lyrics appear Euricius Cordus and others of the " Erfurt poets," who had so much to do with the rally of German Humanism in the Epistolce Ohscurorum.

But what of the results ? That they are much easier and (in a sense) pleasanter to read than the rough German of the time is of course perfectly true ; that men like Hessus and Cordus had infinitely more sense of literature, more criticism, more of other

^ Deutsche Lyrikcr dcs 16ten Jahrhunderts. Ed. Ellinger (Berlin, 1893). Eobani llcssi Noriberga Illustrata, &c. Ed. Neff (Berlin, 1896).

48 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

things, than such a man as Hans Sachs, is almost a truism. And yet the whole has the not unpleasant but faint and pale scent and look of pot-pourri as compared, not exactly with a brier-rose, but at auyrate with ragged -robin and meadow-sweet. The hexa- meters of the Noriherga are capital things of their kind — nervous enough and smooth enough, their cadence varied with a good deal of skill, the de- scription by no means lacking in vividness, and the diction by no means too full of the curse of modern Latin, gradus-epithets and " tags." Among the Lyrics the same author's admiring Elegiacs to and on Luther combine spirit and polish ; the Eclogue of Cordus, Silvius and Polyphcme, has a good flow ; the Dream of Melanchthon, in which Ajax and Christ figure, is vigorous and effective; Mynsinger's Sapphic hymn on the Ascension is neat ; and among the erotic and Anacreontic poems, though nothing comes up to Jo- hannes Secundus, the Quisquis tela Gupidinis of Bruno Seidelius, the pieces to Rosina of Paulus Melissus, and the Suspiria of Tobias Scultetus, though these latter would not commend themselves to a severely Ovidian form-master, are thoroughly agreeable to read. Also Sebastian Schefferus is scandalous but amusing in his " Nine Skins of Women," and dis- tinctly ingenious in the epigram which explains why sheepish boys look at the ground while lively girls look at young men. But always less or more, except in forms and tones for which the vernaculars were not yet sufficiently accomplished, there is the sense of bastardy, of sterility, of mere imitation and echo as

THE HAllVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 49

regards the past, and of want of promise and germ for the future.

The production of England in this branch during the Tudor time was abundant in quantity — the mere dedicatory and complimentary verses pre- fixed to books, English as well as Latin in text, would make a very large collection. At the very beginning the Latin verse of More (see note, infra, p. 87) at once attained European re- cognition. At the end the Epigrams of John Owen (1560-1622) had an even greater vogue on the Con- tinent, and served, in England itself, as a sort of centre to a very large body of epigrammatic writing, in English and Latin, which extends from Heywood at the beginning of the sixteenth century to Tom Brown at the end of the seventeenth, and which would be well worth collection and study. Yet the laureate of Great Britain in these alien bays during this time was no Englishman but a Scot.

Not the least notable or characteristic name in the

present chapter is that of George Buchanan (1506-82),^

who at one time earned for his native

Buchanan. p n ^ t ^ t p

country of Scotland the credit of possessing the best Latinist living in Europe, a possession long considered as implying that of the foremost of European men of letters. This point of view is unlikely to be

' The standard edition of Buchanan's Latin works is the fine one of Ruddiman, 2 vols, folio, Edinburgli, 1715 : of his English, that of Mr Hume Brown for the Scottish Text Society, Edinburgh, 1892. Another signal instance of Buchanan's fame is that Rapin, a century later, in spite of all national, political, and ecclesiastical grudges, allows him "Odes worthy of Antiquity."

D

50 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

recovered ; but the fact that it was once taken by a man like Dr Johnson, to whom Buchanan's nationality was, to say the least, not a cause of attraction, and to whom both his principles and his character were in the strongest degree repulsive, would of itself give him a place here. Fortunately we can afford to dismiss those principles and that character, as well as the life which exhibited them, with the remark that the principles may commend themselves to those who agree with them, and that the character may seem excusable to those who hold the principles.

But the works are not so to be dismissed ; and with the exception of the Detectio Marice it is easy, and even in that case not impossible, to a trained critical intelligence to examine them with due impartiality. It is fortunate, that while in the case of Erasmus, to whose place, though not to whose gifts in prose, Buchanan succeeded, and whom he actually surpassed by his skill in verse, we possess no vernacular compo- sitions to assist us in our view of his Latin books, Buchanan has left us vernacular work of unmistak- able power. The most famous and the best of it, the violent diatribe against Maitland of Lethington, known as the Cameleon, is perhaps intentionally as well as unintentionally embroiled and obscure in style. The weapon is neither rapier, nor broadsword, nor even club ; but a sort of morgenstern or ghisarm, as compli- cated as it is clumsy. Yet the swashing-blow is of formidable sharpness as well as force.

For such elegance as Buchanan possessed we must look to his verse, which is also the only part of his

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 51

Latin work that possesses any interest, except for the historian. The Detectio itself, the Ecs

His Prose. ^. iit\t -r, •

JScohccc, and the iJe Jure Eegni, as well as the Letters, exhibit to the full the study and the practice of a diligent scholar and imitator of Cicero and of Livy. But they have no other literary interest, and this is itself but small. Even in Cicero himself the prevalence of the same forms of speech and phrase, the set rhetoric, the method as of cloisonne enamel, the carefully wrought and curiously selected diction, are found, by some readers at least, more curious than delightful, and more tedious than curious. In a Scotsman writing at the most burning, if not the most shining, crisis of Scottish history, the tagging of stale shreds and thrums becomes inexpressibly unreal and almost positively offensive, quite apart from the matter. And it contrasts curiously with the senti- ment expressed years before by Ascham on the other side of the Border, that it was time to " write English matters in the English tongue for English men."

Let us turn, however, to the verses,^ of which a Scotophobe, a Tory, a hater of Eepublicans, and a severe critic like Dr Johnson, said that their author was " the only man of genius his country ever pro- duced," that he was not merely " a very fine poet," but " a great poetical genius." It was the dedication to Queen Mary, NyinpUa Caledonice, which (though he did not illustrate it therefrom) elicited from the dictator the observation that all the modern languages

• These are obtainable separately in more than one pocket form.

My copy of this is the edition of Wetstein (Amsterdam, 1687).

52 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

could not furnish such melody as Latin verse — an observation which of course simply means that Johnson's ear, by nature or training, or both, could appreciate

" Formosam resonare doccs Amaiyllida sylvas,"

and could not appreciate

" But tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky " ; or —

" Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro " ; or —

" Un doux nenni avec un doux sourire " ; or —

" So diu blomen uz dem grass dringent."

The Nympha Galedonice is certainly a piece of very

smooth elegiacs ; and as everybody has not Buchanan

ThePsaivis ^^ their hands nowadays, we may give it,

awl their leaving readers to find matter of piquancy.

Dedication. c t • i

or matter or disgust, in the remembrance that the poet not long afterwards discovered this paragon of her sex, this honour to her ancestors, this pattern of virtue, this blessing to her country, to be a pest to her country, a reproach to her sex, an incarnation of all the vices, and a scandal to her race : —

" Nympha Caledonige qufe nunc feliciter orae Missa per innumeros sceptra tueris avos : Quae sortem antevenis meritis, virtutibus annos,

Sexum animis, morum nobilitate genus, Accipe (sed facilis) cultu donata Latino Carmina, fatidici nobile regis opus.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 53

Ilia quidem, Cirrha procul et Permesaide lympha,

Poene sub Arctoi sidere nata poll : Nou tamen ausus eram male natum exponere fcetum,

Ne mihi displiceant quae placuere tihi. Nam quod ab ingenio domini sperare nequibant,

Debebunt genio forsitan ilia tuo."

The verses are certainly of the neatest, and Ovid would, I think, have gladly signed the italicised pentameter. For the spirit and its sequel, we may re- member that the pedant is generally by turns syco- phant and lampooner, and that the same person is not seldom the recipient of his absolute impartiality in the discharge of these functions.

It is less easy to share the admiration, which was once, no doubt, sincere, was for a long time fashionable, at least with scholars, and is even now in a dim sort of way traditionally existent, in regard to the version of the Psalms to which these lines serve as Intro- duction. That they are sufficiently elegant Latin is quite true ; ^ but then elegant Latin is about the last kind of medium suitable to Hebrew poetry. It is almost impossible to describe, but it is worth wliile to recommend actual experience of, the curious shock of the contrast which strikes one between the fragments of the Vulgate which, as usual, head the versions, and the first lines in the same, or nominally the same, language which follow. Nor is this the only shock of the kind. Johnson, whose liking for and acquaintance with modern Latin verse gave him probably a greater

^ Porson, I think, is said to have found false quantities in Buch- anan ; but they are certainly not numerous, and are probably, as a rule, rather false readings.

54 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

right to speak than any one now possesses, specially commended Buchanan for his freedom from mere cento-vfork. This freedom may be comparative, but is certainly not positive. For instance, the 4th Psalm (Cmn Invocarem) begins —

" O Pater, o hominum divumque aeterna potestas."

It is impossible that this "hominum divumque po- testas" should not have been suggested to Buchanan by, and that it should not in turn suggest to any tolerable Latinist, not merely the actual phrase in Virgil, but also a certain " hominum divumque volup- tas " ; equally impossible that the contrast should not strike one as damaging in respect of poetry, and slightly ludicrous in point of context and subject. For the longer and more descriptive psalms Buchanan has sometimes selected the continuous hexameter, which has no ill effect in its way ; and he is also not sparing of the dimeter and trimeter couplet, which is also tolerable. But the more definitely lyric metres, especially the Alcaic and the various choriambic ar- rangements, are equally incongruous in sound and in association, while the skip of the Latin Sapphic, so different (at least as usually ordered) from the Greek, is still more out of keeping. David might have danced before the ark to that measure, but he certainly very seldom sings to it.

Perhaps the chief historic interest of Buchanan's Psalter is that its production and popularity not im- probably helped that disastrous process of translating the great mediaeval hymns which was carried on

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 55

during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which ultimately deprived the metrical portions of the Breviary of a very great part, if not of all, of the ineffable music and charm of those wonderful com- positions. Even if the work of a heretic cannot be supposed to have had much direct influence in this way, it is none the less significant as a symptom.

The tragedies, translated and original, will receive their best notice in the chapter on drama; the De Sphcera and the miscellaneous poems concern us here.

Not much need be said of the De Sphcera, where the

poet has endeavoured to treat a Lucre tian subject

in a Virgilian manner, and has at least succeeded in

accomplishing, with extraordinary diligence

The De Sphsera. ^ , . , . ,

and cleverness, an exercise which was not worth accomplishing at all by any one who had emerged from the status pupillaris. To have written such a description of the planets, for instance, as that in the Second Book (p. 129 of the folio, p. 429 duodec.) would not merely be creditable to any undergraduate and an extraordinary feat in any schoolboy, but it would argue in both the acquisition of faculties in literature which could almost certainly be turned to uses both of profit and delight, and of intellectual habits service- able in every relation of life. As a pastime of maturer years it would be liberal and refreshing. But as forming part of a serious and adult performance in some thousands of lines, treating a subject which requires prose, and had best be done in vernacular prose, it is not much more than naught.

The long satire of the Franciscanus weakens its

56 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE,

satire on priestcraft and monkery by a profusion of detail which never once collects itself in one of the true Juvenalian onslaughts ; while in the epigrams of the Fratres Fraterrimi we look equally in vain for the salt of Martial, though not in vain for his ribaldry. So that the results of a rather tedious reading are, first the conviction that most of the things are impossible to quote, and then the consolation that not one of them is worth quoting.

The Elegies are very much better. Of no metre was Buchanan such a master as of this, and the wide range of his Ovidian and Propertian models allowed him a The minor Certain apparent unconventionality even in ^^'^- his conventions. The woes of a Professor of Humanity at Paris, leaving his bed at five o'clock to wield the tawse in one hand and the Virgil in the other, correcting and flogging all day, open the series witli no feigned note. And though the succeeding poems mostly display the artificiality and sometimes the licence of Latin, they are always pleasant to read for mastery of metre and phrase, not interfered with by too great length on the one hand, by brevity without point on the other, or by radical unsuitableness of subject on both. Even where he is both prolix and trivial (as he can be), the complete absence of effort and the easy flow of the verse produce a certain soothing effect. The Syhce, exclusively hexametrical, supply the (to us) bitter irony of the Epithalamium of King Francis and Queen Mary, and the more genial, though equally obvious, satire of the birthday poem for the British Solomon. For this kind of artificial

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 57

work no language is so well suited as Latin, and none disguises the essential hollowness better. Some of the hendecasyllables addressed to JSTesera are really pretty, and seem now and then to throb with something more like blood than the ink (or rather the neat gall) which usually runs in Buchanan's pedant veins. Those on the famous diamond heart which Mary sent to Eliza- beth only just miss, and perhaps do not entirely miss, a great success. The conventional scurrility of most of the so-called Iambics is, as before, relieved with little wit ;* but the more varied subjects and greater bulk of the three books of Epigrams and the one of Miscellanies may seem almost certain to give better results.

They do, as a matter of fact, display Buchanan as an artifex to some advantage. Leonora and Nesera are still contrasted with an odd mixture of conven- tion and sincerity ; for though much of the abuse of Leonora is mere copy of Horace in his more vulgar moods, the continual iteration of the complaint that she admits the love of coqui seems to correspond to something actual. Indeed it is natural that the tutor should be jealous of the chef. But the complimentary addresses, sometimes to persons of real merit and interest such as Ascham and Jewel; the emblematic poems, and some of the epitaphs and other pieces, once more show us capitally the singular suitability of classical Latin for the " occasional " verse. There is, perhaps, not a happier instance anywhere of orthodox but not cut -and -dried expression of the pedagogic spirit than the Sapphics Ad Jiiventutem Burdigalensem, (which juventus, by the way, included, among others,

58 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

Montaigne). On the whole, while we shall seek with- out finding that " great poetic genius " which Johnson's different interpretation of the words enabled him (perhaps on his own standard truly) to find in Buchanan, we shall be able to allow him in his Latin verse the praise, lesser but not small, of having ac- complished that which he set himself to perform. But we shall scarcely find in him much cause for mitigation of the judgment which has to be pronounced on this whole class of work, and which may be thus summed up : The modern Latin poet, except in the cases when his own vernacular was at the time of writing too unaccomplished in itself or too limited in its diffusion, always sins by neglecting to adorn the Sparta to which he owes allegiance. Even then the things that he can do better in Latin are mostly things that need not be done. Taking Buchanan's prose and verse together, it may even be doubted whether he had very much literary faculty beyond vigour and the knack of copying the ancients. In other words, both the heaviest curses of the rhetori- cian are on him ; for if he had some skill in making the worse appear the better reason, he was still more often occupied in giving an appearance of existence and even of beauty to what had no reason to exist, and no right to be beautiful.

In the later volumes of this History there will

in all probability be little room for noticing books

uaer written in Latin, and especially little for

Latin poetry, ^^le later fruits of Latin verse. We may

therefore, without impropriety, take a foreshortened

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 59

view of these. During the rest of the sixteenth century, and during the greater part of the seven- teenth, the language of the Eepublic of Letters held its place, and something more than its place. Nor were the results of its exercise, as they have been called by a rather unworthy sneer, a litUrature de college only. Enough has been said already of the limitations and drawbacks to which this literature was inevitably exposed. But it had still a real, though always a diminishing, reason for existence. That this existence was partly due to delusion must indeed be acknowledged. The Baconian notion (de- rived or partly derived from Cheke, v. infra) that the modern languages would "play the bankrupt" with books had no solid foundation, and was founded in part on the unjust contempt with which the Renaissance regarded the inestimable vernacular pro- ducts of the Middle Ages, in part on a hard-driven metaphor. And it has been punished as it sinned by the equally unjust neglect which for full a century past has come upon modern Latin literature itself. But the notion of a general European audience in- stead of a merely national one was not in itself ignoble; and to such an audience in the political and social circumstances of the time no vernacular — not even Italian — could hope to present itself.

At the same time a critic who could have raised himself to a kind of " Pisgah sight " of literature would even then have distrusted Latin as a literary medium. Almost before the end of the sixteenth century, and with increasing decision during the

60 EUKOPEAN LITERATUEE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

beginning of the seventeenth, it came to be best written in the smaller and less important nations — in those, too, which had dwindling or not yet adult vernaculars. The Scots, the Dutch, the Poles, the Germans, were great at Latin ; the French, the Eng- lish, the Spaniards, the very Italians themselves, grew less and less expert in it, though some of these latter translated their works into Latin in order to cater for the larger auditory.

For some fifty years after the stricter limits of the present volume have closed we still find Latin competing, both in verse and prose, as a general literary medium with every language on its own ground. But the books in it which have lived in general literary history are few, and among the bilingual writers the vernacular works, as in the case of Bruno (1549-1600), have always carried it over the " regular " ; while of those who mainly or wholly wrote in Latin, such as Campanella (1569-1639) the memory has become dim and second-hand. In the first half of the seventeenth century two admirable Latin verse-writers, Arthur Johnstone (1587-1641)^ and Casimir Sarbiewski (1595-1640), compel the admira- tion of scholars, if they are hardly known to the general reader ; but the one represents a vernacular which, after a short but brilliant flourishing time, was about to drop into the state of a dialect, and the other one which had not yet attained to anything like majority among the languages of Europe. A

^ Johnstone was part editor, and in much greater part author, of the Dcliciw Poetarum Scotorum (2 vols., Amsterdam, 1637).

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 61

group or succession of groups of brilliant French hymn-writers, of whom the brothers Santeuil (1630- 1697; 1628-1674) are the chief, puts in some little excuse for the persevering efforts of the Eoman curia to emasculate and " restore " the exquisite hymnaries of the Middle Ages. In England poets or men of letters of the greatest distinction in successive genera- tions— Milton, Addison, Johnson — cling to the tra- dition of verse-writing, and Pope edits a collection of Humanist poetry. But even those who take most delight in Latin poetry will hardly admire with warmth the Upitaphmvi Damonis when they think of Lycidas, the Hpigrammata and even the Elegies when they think of the Sonnets. If the Barometri Descriptio, and the Sphceristerium, and the Machince Gesticulantes, and 0 qtd canoro hlandius Orpheo, can be read with much less distraction, this is due, first, to the fact that Addison was not, in English, a great poet at all, that his poetical gifts were much more adequate to his actual occupation ; and, secondly, to the fact that all these poems frankly range them- selves under the class of the " copy-of- verses," the kind of poem which is not inevitable at all, and does not pretend to be so. And this is increasingly the case with the Latin poems of Johnson, with the version of the Messiah, the Urbane nidlis /esse laboribus, and the pieces on Skye. If it is not so with some of his short religious epigrams and ejacu- lations, that is precisely because the form and the thought are here indissolubly married, and the memory of Vexilla Regis and Dies Irce carries Summe dator vilce

62 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

and Eterne rerum conditor under the shadow of its wing.

The writer of these pages would be more chagrined than by any other possible misunderstanding if it were to be supposed that these remarks, or any that have been made in this chapter, rank him in the society of those who regard the practice of Latin and Greek verse as mischievous or superfluous in youth, and as trivial in age. Experience intrenches him impreg- nably in the belief that the disuse of composition in the classical tongues, and especially in their verse, is the greatest and most fatal mistake of recent edu- cational reforms, and is more responsible than any- thing else for the decline, at once of elegance and of vigour, in vernacular English compositions during the last two or three decades. As for later exercises in either harmony, they possess the double character of all worthy pastimes, that of giving at once pleasure and exercise itself. But excellence as discipline and excellence as pastime are quite different things from the substantive excellence of literature. Whensoever a language has attained to such a position of import- ance, and to such a faculty of expression that it is adequate to the conveying of literary matter that is worth the conveyance, then for a man of genius, or even a man of talent, to write in another language, dead or foreign, for any other purpose than mere amuse- ment and display of his versatility, is fxoxOos Trepia-ao^ Kov^6vov<i t' €vr]6la. This was not the case with Erasmus or even with the authors of the Hpistoloe

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 63

Ohscurorum Virorum, and they were accordingly justi- fied, and their books have lived. It was dubiously the case with More. It was quite certainly not the case with Ariosto or with Molza, with La Casa, or later with Milton.

Yet when all is said, how venial (except in the case of the very greatest men, whose every word in their proper medium is priceless) are transgressions of this sort ! How near to virtues they come when we com- pare them with the slovenly facilities of the vernacular, wherewith in ever-increasing measure we have been afflicted for these last three centuries ! To these Latin works, even to the merest exercises among them, and the least successful of these, there went some knowledge, some pains, even some rudimentary exer- tion of judgment and taste, and some special selection of subject, language, form. He who seeks similar monuments in vernacular literature had need to be much more circumspect.

Before passing to the Latin prose — in some cases so much more brilliant — which also distinguishes our Mamronic time, I havc thought it allowable, and per- '*^**' haps on the whole most convenient, to

notice the singular freaks in what is called "Maca- ronic." For these are closely connected both with the popularity of the Latin and the immaturity of the vernaculars, and they contribute to European litera- ture work but a little below the best of the period in power.

There is no more curious figure (in the best sense of

64 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

the adjective) to be found during our period than that of Girolamo Folengo/ or Teofilo, or Mer- linus Coccaius, or Limerno Pitocco, or Triperuno, of which abundant sheaf of aliases the first is his proper name and surname, the second Christian name that which he assumed in cloister life, and the third, fourth, and fifth the various appellations with which he subscribed different parts of his eccentric but far indeed from negligible work.

As has been suggested in the note, Folengo is very much " for thoughts " to those who are not happy unless they can connect literature with philosophy, sociology, religion, and the like outside things ; but his purely literary interest is amply sufficient and in one sense unique. What celebrity he has enjoyed of late years has been very mainly due to the fact of his being to some extent a creditor of Rabelais, who

^ Most conveniently accessible in Signer Attilio Portioli's edition of all but the late and (it is said) negligible divine poems (3 vols., Mantua, 1883-89). This contains not merely the Baldus, but the ZanitoneUa, the Moscheis, the Italian Orlandino, and the very remarkable, though more than enigmatic Caos. This last, of which even Mr Symonds, a warm admirer of Folengo, says nothing (probably because in its great rarity before this reprint he had not come across it), is a partly Italian, partly Macaronic medley of prose and verse, where figure three of Folengo's female relations — his mother Paola, his sister Corona, and his niece Livia — the poet himself under his various noms de guerre, and divers abstractions. It is in part an apology for his youthful errors, in part a philosophico-religious allegory of the kind not uncommon in Italy between the days of Francesco Colonna and those of Bruno. For that very puzzling history of Italian thought at the time, which, despite the pains and genius which have been spent on it, has never been fully cleared up, it has probably not a little importance. But it scarcely belongs, like its fellows, to the text as literature.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 65

refers to him as Merlinus Coccaius, and who may not at all improbably have borrowed from him not merely something of Panurge (who is in parts very like the Coccaian Cingar), but even something of the whole notable Gargantuan and Pantagruelian Odyssey. He is, however, far indeed from being obliged to rely on the calling in of this lent splendour. In three respects-^ as the chief, without like or second, of Macaronic poetry, as a master of expression in Latin, Macaronic, and Italian, and as a satiric realist of re- markable force, with an amount of imagination to which the realist does not often attain — he deserves a place only below the very greatest of the period.

In a History of European Literature the first claim is not the least. The scorn with which Macaronics are frequently, if not always, spoken of is not the least unwise of scorns — which is saying a good deal. It is true that the word has several senses. In its widest it is applied to a deliberately mixed jargon of different languages — Greek and Latin, Latin and modern of various kinds — the words being used in each case according to their own grammar, and as they would have been used in continuous work of their own languages. Examples of this may be found (not to mention Cicero's constant introduction of Greek words into his letters) in Ausonius (especially in the Epistle to Paulus) and in many of the popular Latin poems of the Middle Ages. It not seldom produces an amusing effect in a short piece, but would be very tiresome in a long one. The stricter Macaronic dia- lect is formed by the admixture of pure Latin words

E

66 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

with words in some modern language formed and inflected as if they were Latin. The Macaronic writer of this stricter school would never have been in any danger of offending Dr Johnson by making Carteret a dactyl, though he might have taken the liberty of scanning " Carteretus " " Carteretus," or " Carteretus," according as he was writing hendeca- syllabics or hexameters.

Macaronics of this sort were written, during and after the Humanist period, in most European lan- guages, the inducements being the familiarity of writers and educated readers with both tongues, and the amusing effect that most jargon has till it gets wearisome. But, for reasons the most obvious, no language offered such facilities for the practice as Italian. Not only did the words assume forms very similar to those which they probably, if not certainly, held during the obscure passage of Latin into Italian itself, but it is by no means certain that divers of the Italian terms now hatted and booted with Latin garb had not actually existed in the vernacular speech of Italy during classic times. It is not rash to say that some of Folengo's own Mantuan patois may very possibly have been familiar, in much the same form, to Virgil as a boy.

Accordingly an Italian, and specially North Italian, school of Macaronic poets had arisen long before Folengo.^ By these, however, Macaronic had been

^ On the chiefs of this, Tifi Odassi, Alione d'Asti, &c., see Symonds' Italian Literature, chap. xiv. But those who can should consult Delepierre's Macarondana (Paris, 1852, published also at

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 67

chiefly used for burlesque novelle, comic scenes and characters of a detached kind, and sometimes for local or other satire. It was reserved for Folengo to use it as an engine of imitative attack on the two most popular and considerable forms of verse in the Italy of the early sixteenth century, the Epic and the Pastoral.

Folengo resembled his great follower in being for

most of his life a self-unfrocked monk ; but, unlike

Kabelais, he was of noble birth. He was

His life

born at Cipada, the village which he has drawn so freely in Bcddus, was a student at Bologna, a pupil of Pomponazzo, and seems to have been driven to take the cowl by the wildness of his conduct. He joined the Benedictines at Brescia, and took Teofilo for his " name of religion " ; but after a few years, in 1515,

Brighton; there is a second part, London, 1862, which I do not possess), and the Italian collection of Cinque Pocte (the usual five) Maccheronci (Milan, 1864). The contents, however, require a rather strong stomach, and a brain agile in the interpretation of jargon, from the reader. They confirm the existence of a sort of gallimaufry of Romance, older and youugei-, connected with hybrid French -Italian romances of the Carlovingian cycle, and they show how a person of genius can raise the basest of styles and lingos to— or near — litera- ture. Perhaps it may be well here to take notice of another jargon, which is sometimes called the lingua pcdantcsca, and opposed for- mally to Macaronic as substituting a Latinised Italian for an Italian- ated Latin. It is found to some extent in the Hijpncrotomachia (see TIlc Transition Period, p. 393), and still more eminently, it is said, in some smaller, rarer, and less noteworthy productions which I have not thought it necessary to hunt up. For it seems to me a mistake to isolate this " pedantesque." It is, as Mr Gregory Smith hints in loc, ci<., simply the Italian variety of that "aureate," rhetoriqucur, "ink-horn" jargon which overflowed all Eurojje in the fifteenth century, and for which Italian naturally offered peculiar facility.

68 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

when he was not five-and- twenty, fled from his con- vent with a certain Girolama Dieda, with whom he seems to have been passionately in love, and who long accompanied him, it is said, in the wanderings about Italy, then necessary to a man living by his wits. He was still quite young when the long Baldus or Macaronea par excellence appeared, and he seems to have remained eleven years a wanderer. But after the Orlandino he wrote the repentant Caos in 1527, was taken back with the ease which still governed ecclesiastical things (though it was on the point of being exclianged for the severity of the Roman Cath- olic Eeaction), accomplished certain pious works, and died, still in middle age, in 1544. There is, however, a good deal of uncertainty about all these events. He is thought by some to have glanced severely at La Dieda in the Baldus; but the reference seems to me of the most doubtful character, and a passage in Caos, which contains her name in an unmistakable acrostic and is animated with equally unmistakable affection, is years later. That his verse is often ex- tremely severe on love and on women is true ; but he was a monk, and an Italian, and a satirist.

He was also something very like a man of genius ; and savage as he can be now and then, coarse as Andviinor he is too ofteu, his work seldom or never workx. leaves that "bad taste in the mouth" which is too frequently the consequence of reading Italian of this time when it is indecorously amusing, or that inclination to cover a yawn with a " bravo ! " which comes on us when it is decorously rhetorical.

THE IIAEVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 69

His talent shows better in the Macaronic pieces than in the vernacular Orlandino, and better in the Baldus and the Zanitonella than in the Moscheis. This last, though not unamusing, is only one of the numerous imitations of the BatrachomyomacMa. The Orlandino may be open to the charge of linguistic and metrical shortcomings ; my own Italian is not choice enough to make these teasing to me. But it is certainly open to one far more formidable from the literary point of view, the charge which was once put in the question : "X., what is the good of throwing your clumsy half-bricks, when Y. has just been shooting his beauti- ful silver arrows ? " With Pulci or Politian (Folengo seems to have believed in Politian's authorship) long before, with the great Orlando Furioso itself just out, and with Berni's rehandling of the Innamorato com- ing, Italian hardly wanted a thing like the Orlandino, which is not only a fragment but a fragment of un- certain purpose, now burlesquing the romances, now violently attacking the monks, and now adding to this attack something like an open display of Luther- anism. It is, however, full of vigour: and there is little doubt that Eabelais knew it, as well as the Macaronea.

Before coming to this latter we must devote a little space to the Zanitonella, where Folengo is very clever i.;,g and almost good-humoured. The absur-

zanitoneiia. (jitics of the conveutioual pastoral, and the crudities of the real, are displayed in a most suitable medium. The cruelty of Giovanina (Zanina in Lombardo-Venetian), the sufferings of Tonello, the

70 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

good advice in vain of his friend Salvigno, and the final revolt of the injured swain, are all told in a series of Eclogues, Sonolegie, and Stramhottolegie, in elegiacs or hexameters, where the quaint lingo suits itself to the purpose singularly well.

The Baldus tries a higher flight, and (though Folengo

was, in fact, anticipating most of the critics) observes,

with what looks like intentional irrever-

The Baldus or . i • i <.

ence, all the conditions which for two cen- turies were to exercise the mind of critical Europe about a "heroic poem": — the noble origin of the hero, his early struggles, his friends and enemies, the deorum ministeria, the visit to the infernal regions, and the rest. It is also in uniform hexameters, which sometimes observe fairly classical Latin for a batch of lines together and then break off, only the more amusingly, into the grotesque, but spirited and by no means always unmusical, jargon of Macaronic proper. Erom more than one feature in his work Folengo would seem to have been of those who, sometimes not 7%e Macaroiiea ^^ the least from poverty of imagination, itsdf. jjjjg ^Q repeat and re- work their motives.

The earlier cantos of the Macaronea exhibit this fea- ture, both in reference to the Orla7idi7io, which, though published later, was we know written earlier, and to the Zanitonella. The birth and parentage of Baldus and Orlandino are extremely similar, and many points of the Zanitonella repeat themselves with a difference in the earlier Macaronea. It is only after the Tenth Canto, when the hero is freed from prison by the devices of Cingar, that the poem rises higher

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 71

than village and domestic quarrels. Baldus, Cingar, the giant Fracassus, and the dog-man Falchettus set out on a series of adventurous travels, in which they are joined by others, from the Virgin Knight Leonardo (who is slain by bears because he will not yield to the blandishments of a sorceress) down to miscellaneous ne'er-do-wells,^ They suffer a great tempest — wherein Cingar's terrors furnished the model to those of Pan- urge^ — they visit the stars, they study the sciences, they have difficulties with pirates. But the later books settle down into a curious battle between Baldus and his " barons " on the one hand and the community of witches and warlocks on the other. They first encounter the above-mentioned sorceress, Muselina, and then the Queen of the Witches, Smyrna Culfora (Mr Symonds reads (rulfora), in her capital, which Fracassus destroys, while Baldus and the rest make a murder grim and great of the queen and her courtiers. Emboldened by this success, they visit the infernal regions themselves in the last three books; and the poem closes half abruptly, half properly, in the depths of an enormous gourd, the destined region of vain poets in Hell, where they lose teeth and grow them again perpetually in punishment for their lies.

^ It is worth observing that at the outset of the voyage Folengo brings in, as an aheady known and settled thing, the hatred between peasants and soldiers, which, beginning no doubt still earlier, is so evident in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which serves as a motive as late as the Simplicissimus of Grimmelshauseu, and perhaps later still.

'•' As the adventure of the sheep had previously done. Rabelais, however, improves on both most remarkably.

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Now Merlinus Coccaius himself is a false poet : there- fore he will be detained in the gourd : therefore he can go no farther. Nothing can be more logical.

The respectable folk who think that everything has an explanation, and are miserable till they have got this explanation into a condition satisfactory to them- selves, have not meddled much with Folengo ; indeed, for centuries past he has been very little read. But it is obvious that the Delilah of interpretative allegory would have not the slightest difficulty in spreading her snares for his readers ; in fact, Mr Symonds all but falls into them, and wrenches himself out with a kind of effort. Those who are content to understand with- out explaining, and to appreciate without hypothesis, will have no great difficulty in untwining, if they care to do so, the various strands which at least may have made up the fantastic rope of Folengo's thought It is one of the main glories of Romance that burlesques of it always end by glorifying and illustrating the charms of the Muse of Romance herself, and Folengo is no exception. Baldus is a burlesque romance of adven- ture, no doubt, but it is a romance of adventure all the same. The wayward ex-monk availed himself of what has been called the glorious Romantic freedom to hunt many subordinate hares, and bring a vast amount of miscellaneous oddities into his treasure-house. Lucian was a particularly popular author at this time, and the influence of The Time History and perhaps other pieces is clear. The character-sense was being much developed, and Cingar is one of the earliest very am- bitious and elaborate exercises of it in modern times.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 73

In wit and a certain perenniality and universality he is not the equal of Panurge at his best ; but he is a rather better fellow, more practically ingenious, and perhaps truer to the comic side of specially Latin nature. Baldus, like most heroes, is rather colourless ; and his anger at finding that his wife Berta, whom he has practically deserted, has married somebody else, is more natural than reasonable ; while Berta herself, though quite flesh and blood in her battles with her sister and her pranks on the amorous Toguazzo, dis- appears early, reappearing but dimly as a witch. The witchcraft episodes are certainly very curious in con- nection with the extraordinary outburst of fanaticism on that subject in the hundred or hundred and fifty years following. It is not at all improbable that the semi - Protestantism which is unmistakable in the Orlandino, and which may hide itself under the mystical circumlocutions of the Coos, counts for some- thing in the Macaronea itself. And though Italy was never (her sons always having been well educated in a manner) bitten with the education-mania to the same extent as Germany, France, and England, this also appears. But on the whole Folengo exhibits, in a singularly suitable medium, the quaint waywardness of a soul et vitiis et virtutibus impar, not quite fortunate in its surroundings at any time, having lost its way in so far as any coherent scheme of life is concerned, but generous, instructed, aspiring. No Italian writer of his time is more affected by Dante, which is in itself a mighty quality. None speaks more generously of Ariosto, his own contemporary, and to some extent

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the subject of his ironic exercises. His swashing - blows in the combat of Lombard v. Tuscan are thoroughly good-humoured ; and his Macaronic dialect itself is a sort of sneering concession to the general Italian refusal to recognise an Illustrious Vulgar, and to the endless naggings -and nigglings of philological pedants. His hatreds — of the French, who were the curse of Italy throughout his life ; of the monks, his sojourn with whom had proved so intolerable ; of the landlords, with whom he had also had difficulties in his resourceless wanderings — are never bad-blooded, and always relieved by humour.^ And as for his lingo, whosoever does not perceive the charm of parlatus in

"Et sic parlatus subito discedit ab illis"

will never perceive it, and whoso does will perceive it at once.^

To pass from the artificial verse of the Renaissance,

^ Tlicre are indeed ugly exceptions which remind us that we have, after all, to do with an Italian of the sixteenth century. The worst of these — under the rubric, it is true, of " Atroce supplicio," but related with perfect coolness and apparently no kind of disgust at the torturers — is the story of the horrible mutilations inflicted, without despatching him, but leaving him to be eaten alive by gadflies, on the wretched Podesta, not merely by Baldus, who thinks himself a peas- ant's son, and though a brave is a decidedly brutal champion through- out,— not merely by Cingar, who is a peasant, and of a ruthless and cowardly nature, — but by the stainless knight, Leonardo.

■■^ Better still, perhaps, as a single line is the description of the third kind of wine furnished by the abominable hosts —

" Et qui duin bibitur veiitris penetralia rasTpat,"

where the sudden barbarism after the orderly Latin of the firbt six words gives the real comic surprise.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 75

and from the less really than apparently unnatural Latin Prose- Macaronic, to the Latin Prose-writing of the writing. time, is not merely, in the old parallel, to step from a conservatory into a garden, but to pass from a museum of dried plants into the natural wealth of fields and woods. Here, though we may a little regret in some cases that the writers did not use the vernaculars, there is hardly any loss in their doing so. The language which they use was as easy to them as the vernacular itself, and in most cases much better suited to their purpose. Accordingly we have, in the literature to which we are coming, more than one or two of the really great books of the world on any fairly wide estimate of greatness. Yet, neglecting the charge of paradox, we may add that the prose needs less elaborate handling than the verse, for two reasons. First, because the much greater detail which will be given to the best examples of it carries a representative treatment of the rest ; and secondly, because a very great deal of it — in fact by far the greatest part — is not really literature at all, but mere journey-work and business communication. The most unsuccessful writer of the most trivial or inelegant Latin verse was at any rate trying to be a man of letters; in the majority of cases the user of Latin prose was using it merely as he might have used a plate or a spoon, a chair or a table, to carry on the ordinary occupations of life. But the Colloquies, the Utopia, the IHpistolce Ohscuroi'UTti Virorum, these will give us texts of in- terest hardly distinguishable from that attaching to the greatest vernacular writings, the Orlandos and

76 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

the Pantagruels, of our time. And we shall be able to notice a few minor books and some important classes, incidents, and aspects of literature generally.

The pathetic story of the hapless and technically lawless loves of Gerard and Margaret — father and mother of Desiderius Erasmus — has been embellished and preserved by the genius of not the least of English novelists.^ Erasmus was born at Rotterdam in 1467, and after a life even more wandering than that of the average Humanist, died at Basle in 1536. He was educated by the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer, took (but only provisionally) Augustinian vows, was or- dained priest, finished his studies at the sordid Col- lege de Montaigu at Paris, the butt of all Northern Humanists ; spent much time in repeated visits to England, where he learnt Greek at Oxford and taught it at Cambridge; lived in Italy and in the Nether- lands, but was in his later years constantly gravitating towards the place of his final sojourn and death. Basle was the home of the great printer Erobenius and the place of publication of Erasmus's own edition of the New Testament, 1516, to which, by common consent, all modern Scriptural study owes its new start. These later years were passed in the controversies, natural at a time of the most violent and revolutionary intel- lectual excitement, between a man too moderate in temper, too cool in judgment, and too wide-ranging in erudition to be a thorough partisan. Erasmus, though nobody of competence failed to regard him as the

' In The Cloister and the Hearth,

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 77

head of European letters, was the object of abuse from Luther and Hutten as being a Pelagian and not a Protestant ; from the extreme and more ped- antic defenders of the papacy as being an op- ponent of Scholastic philosophy, an innovator in Scriptural studies, and a leaner towards heresy ; and from Scaliger and others as a satirist of the absurd Ciceronianism which marked the decadence of the Humanist epoch.

Besides the Greek Testament just noted, which requires no further comment here, Erasmus produced a very large amount of work ^ entirely in Latin, and almost entirely (as far as value is concerned, though he wrote verse like other people 2) in prose. Besides his extensive Correspondence, part of which was published in 1529 and reprinted with additions by himself, and the Colloquies and Encomium MoHob, which will be fully noticed in a moment, his chief productions are two large collections of Adagia (1508) and Apophtheg- mata{lb2>21 3?), which had immense influence in their own time, but are now chiefly curiosities. They

^ The fullest edition is that of Leclerc, Lyons, 1703-1706, in ten volumes. Lives of him, down to that of Mr Froude, which has been noticed supra in the Preface, are very numerous, the material afforded by the Letters being tempting. The separate works are in most cases only obtainable in old editions. But the J rfagria (especially in abridg- ments) and the Apophthcgmata were very often reprinted. The Colloquia and the Encomium Morice occur consecutively in two volumes of the little Tauclmitz classical library, and will be found one of the best of pocket-book companions for a lifetime. Erasmus should never be read in any language but his own Latin, which is a perfectly living tongue and as easy as possible.

^ There are some seventy pages of it in the Delidee Poetarum Bdgicorum,

78 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

contain au enormous collection, constantly enlarged and revised by the author, of stories, sayings, maxims, proverbs, &c., of all times, but especially of ancient times, digested into a sort of moral and intellectual vadc iiiecum. The Adagia in particular were epitom- ised in a still voluminous form,^ and served as a Thesaurus of literary and general culture for some two centuries. So did the Apophthegmata} These books show the point of view of the Renaissance admirably, but have not the living and intrinsic literary quality of the Colloquies. The Ciceroniamis, above referred to, is later, and shows us Erasmus from another side, but always with the same innate and constantly maintained good sense, the same quiet but bright and dramatic humour, taking part against the abuse and caricature of that scholarship which, more sensibly used, was one of his own great titles to fame, and seemed to his contemporaries to be his greatest.

The Colloquies rank among the books which every- body is supposed to have read, though it might perhaps be interesting to test the reality of this supposition in any chance society of well-educated people.

rA« Colloquies. _^ *' , . -^ , , , i • ,

However this may be, the book is one of those which can sustain their reputation, and which, read over and over again for many years, at longer or shorter intervals, and in the most diverse conditions of age and knowledge and circumstance, must always please fit readers. It is, indeed, rather an odd book.

^ Of the epitomised Adagia I use the Oxford ed. of 1666, which has more than 800 pp. of small and close print. Of the Apophthey- maia, that of Ravenstein (Amsterdam, 1671).

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One seldom finds the true key to anything in its Ad Ledorcm ; and the elaborate apology, De Utilitate Col- loquiorum, which the author thought fit to append, though itself by no means devoid either of use or of interest, tells nothing like the whole story. To tell that story might have consisted with the modesty of Erasmus, which, though considerably greater than that of the average Renaissance scholar, was not his strongest quality ; but he could hardly have gone far enough from his own work, or regarded it from a sufficient height, to appreciate its true character and excellence. For it is, as may have been said elsewhere, one of the best mirrors of the time, and with the Utopia, the Epistolcv Obscurorum, and Garyantua and Pantagruel, one of the four books of the Manual of the Renaissance out of Italy. In it, as in the others, with the exception of a gleam or two in Rabelais (too often missed by his readers, or at anyrate denied by his critics), we find, indeed, nothing of romance or of poetry — the busy eagerness of the time left little room for such things except in Italy itself, where circum- stances infected both either with a sensual and erudite superficiality or with a touch of burlesque. But of the prose, the actual life and business of the time, even of its aspirations beyond mere business in some respects, we find an astonishingly faithful mirror in the Colloquies. Of philosophy there is again little ; but then the time, out of Italy once more, was not one of abstract philosophising. But there is abundant religion, and of a very good kind. Erasmus has been too often spoken of in this respect, as though he were of the

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race of Facing-both-ways, if not even of that of By-ends. He must have been a most accomplished hypocrite if this be true, and if, nevertheless, he was the author of the Pietas Puerilis and the Puerpera, to name no others. For healthy and at the same time amiable morality we may open the book almost at random ; while it yields, almost as universally, that cheerful and intelligent interest in humanity and things human which is the best side of the whole movement and period. One may well sigh — though knowing all the time that the Might-have-Been is simply the Might-not-have-Been — to think that this combination of qualities, at once delightful and estimable, should have had to give way to the coarse and earthy partisanship of Luther, to the sour fanaticism of Calvin, and to the reactionary Machiavelism of the Jesuits, in the contest for the position of ruling spirits of the time. And English- men— Anglicans at least — will be a little comforted by the thought that in no part of the Christian Church has so much of the spirit of Erasmus been preserved as in the Church of England. Indeed liis only draw- backs here are a slight touch, not by any means a strong one, of Puritanism, in which the Church of England fortunately did not follow him, and an almost unreasoning though not unreasonable detestation of monachism, for which indeed there were many excuses, but which he, like Eabelais and others, carried much too far.

The Colloquies, intended as they are for popular reading, do not exhibit the excellent quality of his erudition to quite such an extent as some of his other

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 81

work ; yet we have it in the Gonvivia, in the Synodus Grammaticomm and others. In all these we see the enemy at once of the barbarous and of the exclusively Ciceronian, the wide reader, the patient yet not merely or meticulously philological scholar, and even now and then the seeker after a kind of critical appreciation which had been almost unknown in mediaeval, and not too common in classical, times.

But all these things are still somewhat in the out- skirts, in the applied departments of literature proper. As regards its most central and purest functions, the Colloquies make a great book still. Their admirable expression throughout — the gift which makes their Latin the most living and accomplished of its kind, at once neither slavishly classical nor barbarously modern — is a very great matter. That Erasmus comes third, and by no means a bad third, to Plato and Lucian in the use of the dialogue, is perhaps even a greater. Nor should he lack the highest praise for his adaptation of motive and material. The legend of St Thais, and perhaps Hroswitha's play of Paphmctius, founded on it,^ left him, for instance, not much to do in regard to the donn^e of the Adolescens ct Scortum ; yet how ad- mirably has he presented the old matter !

Perhaps, however, his very greatest merit is one which has not been very commonly allowed him. This lies Their relation ^^ ^^^ Immense strides which his Colloquies, to the future univcrsally popular as they were, made in the direction of the two great literary kinds wherein modern literature was to make progress as com-

^ Conrad Celtes had printed Hroswitha in 1501. F

82 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

pared with ancient — the drama and the novel. The first point needs no labouring : many passages of the less dida.ciic Colloquies, and some of them even as wholes, are stage-play ready made, and of the modern much more than of the ancient kind. But the experiments and advances in the direction of the novel made by the Colloquies are even more remarkable. The story, especially the short story, had of course been one of the chief, though the most haphazard, triumphs of the Middle Ages ; but in this, as well as elsewhere, the mediaeval shortcomings in respect of Character, and the rudimentary, though distinct, conception of its dramatic faculty, had made themselves felt. Erasmus, though choosing to speak " by personages," writes what are really finished novel-scenes. Everybody ought to know the way in which the failing but still admirable art of Scott has turned, with the slightest possible alteration, the famous account of the German inns in the Diversoria into a vivid chapter of AuTie of Geier- stein; and very many people know how Charles Eeade wrought this afresh, and many other passages of the Colloquies for the first time, into The Cloister and the Hearth. But it would require far less skill than that of the author of Waverley, or the author of It is Never too Lode to Mend, to perform this process. Colloquy after colloquy, in whole or part, gives example to the fit artist how to manage original matter in the same way. A batch of four running, the Procus et Puella, the Virgo Misogamos, the Virgo Fosnitens, and the Conjugium, are simply novel-chapters; the clumsiest novelist could hardly spoil them in turning them into

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 83

the narrative form, while any practitioner of spirit and gift could not but have been guided by them, if the novel-writing spirit had been at all abroad. The vividness of the Naufrayiuvi is admitted and incon- testable : Defoe himself not improbably borrowed from it. The Miles et Carthusianus is rather satire or satirical drama than novel, but it would give a hint. And the Convivmm Poeticum, with the stock but freshly adapted part of the grumbling gouvernante Margaret, is a " Scene of Literary Life " three hundred years older than the nineteenth century. As much may be said, in its different kind, of the Colloquium Senile, all the parts of which would bear expansion into Tales, and of the Franciscani, where, by tlie way, Erasmus is far less rabid against the friars than is usual with him and with his fellows. This cannot be said of the Pereyrinatio Eeligionis ergo, one of the best known of the whole, and one of the most interesting to English readers. But its novel- quality, in the description both of place and per- formance at Walsingham and Canterbury, is simply unmistakable.

There are similar touches in the curious medley of the Ichthyologia and elsewhere ; but the chief loci for the purpose of the novelist have been noted, and we must not allow this historical, or rather prophetic, interest of the book too much to obscure its in- trinsic excellences — consummate felicity of expression, and an extraordinarily vivid presentation of the real ways, thoughts, wishes of men. The writer is not thinking of the rules ; he is not thinking of copying

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anybody, except, perhaps, Lucian now and then; he is not aiming at stock allegory, or stock anything else. He is simply holding up the mirror to life as steadily and as adroitly as he can, and now and then preach- ing, with sincerity, geniality, and good sense not too constantly found in sermons.

The Encomium Morice (1511), which is usually printed with the Colloquies, though a rather famous rA« Encomium book, is inferior to the best of them, but Monae. g|.jjj ^^^ unamusing in parts. To carry off

the ironic handling at this length a stronger, not to say a fiercer, satire than P>asmus could, or would, apply is necessary : we want Master Francis or the Dean, not the amiable Desiderius. Strength, indeed, is at no time this pleasant and invaluable writer's eminent quality. He is astonishingly fertile, erudite, deft, accomplished, even in a way original, but he some- what lacks intensity. And this is why, no doubt, he was in a sense, and for a time, something of a failure, why he seems even something of a faineant among the martial Martins and the swaggering Scali- gers of his time. Violence was required just then, both to take, and to save from storm, the kingdom of heaven ; and Erasmus could never be violent.

Of the scholar, however, he is an admirable type, one hardly less admirable of the man of letters, and one not to be despised of man simply as man. Some vanity, some disposition, half-arrogant, half -cringing, to be a pensioner on great men's bounty rather than an independent, or nearly independent, professional

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 85

person, and a certain vagabondage connected with this, were ingrained in the average Humanist ; and Erasmus displays them all, though not malignantly. But the comparison of him to Voltaire, though no doubt meant as a compliment, and with some colour from the merely literary side, is grossly unfair to Erasmus in more ways than one. Of Voltaire's spite, of his sniggering and semi-virile indecency, of his cheap cynicism and free- thought, of his smattering erudition, there is no trace in Erasmus : on the contrary, the opposite of each of these things is among his honourable distinctions. If it be true (as a critic, himself a scholar, M. Nisard, put it) that he is now " only a great writer for the learned," this is only a proof of the degeneration of European culture. Except in very few cases where a glossary may be required, Erasmus is perfectly intelligible to any decently educated schoolboy of fourteen : he wrote in the language which he himself no doubt spoke al- most exclusively for ordinary purposes ; and to this day the absence of "deadness" about it is one of its most remarkable characteristics. On the other hand, it had, as has been so often insisted, the quality of suppleness and adaptation to the special literary purpose which no vernacular, not even Italian, possessed, or was to possess for some years to come. Had he written in his native language he would now be really " dead," the plaything and privilege of the few persons who give themselves the trouble to learn a secondary modern tongue. And it would not be the least cogent of a thousand arguments against the disuse of classical

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education that it would make Erasmus as inaccessible as if he had actually written in Dutch.^

As a man of letters, More, who will be noticed again in the English chapter, is a much lesser man than More .-the Erasmus, and the Utopia is a much lesser Utopia. book than the Colloquies. The place which it has sometimes enjoyed in English literature is absurd, for, as pointed out above, it is really not English at all except as a translation, while it cannot as such pretend to any such place as is enjoyed, for the mere merit of the English, by the Froissart of Berners or the Montairjne of Florio, the jEneid of Dryden or the Iliad of Pope. To us, however, who are considering European literature, it belongs most properly, and even by a double title. It is in the first place a capital example of the cosmopolitan use of Latin, which at this time reached its zenith, and henceforward began, though not at first rapidly, to descend. In the second it exhibits the Kenaissance tendency to a curious hybrid perfectibilism — half Pagan, half Christian on the one side, half Science,

^ A note may be the best place for a capital example of a cla."3s of literature now ostensibly defunct — Melanchthon's Declamations (re- printed in parts, ed. Hartfelder, Berlin, 1891-94). There are not, to my knowledge, any better examples extant of those " promotion " or graduation addresses, which were once universal (and which are still retained in the Scottish universities, though in the English they are chiefly confined to the honorary graduates) than Melanchthon's orations Dc Gradihus and Dc Ordine Diccndi, while those De Bcstitucndh Scholis, De Studiis Linr/uce Graces, are discourses of the first import- ance on two of the most important subjects of the time. Nor are those De Artihus Libcndibus and De Miscriis Padaf/of/onim less than very neat harpiuga on very old tunes.

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half Eomance on the other — and the Eenaissance en- thusiasm for education. Not merely written in a for- eign language, but published abroad, it was addressed very much more to Europe than to England, and it was from men like Erasmus that More hoped for his chief welcome and acceptance. Indeed, save some slight adaptation to the special economic and historical circumstances of our island, there is nothing specially English about it. The effects of the discovery of America, the new Platonic imaginings, even that kind of desire for moderate reformation in religion which commended itself to Erasmus himself, and which perhaps might have been carried out if there had been no Luther, no Calvin, and (best of all) no Human Nature — all appear. The Utopia'^ appears to have been written in the

^ It must be repeated that the book ought to be read in Latin : though for those who cannot or will not do this, Mr Arber's well- known edition in his Reprints is very useful. My copy is the Basle edition of 1563, with other Latin works of the author, Progymnasmata (not in the rhetorical meaning of the word, but emulative trans- lations of classical verse by More and Lilly), Epigrams, Lucianic trans- lations, exercises, and Letters. The Letters will be noticed with their kind. The verses (for " Epigrams " is even according to the widest in- terpretation of that word too narrow) are of some considerable extent, and even where they show no great poetical power, sometimes though not always exhibit already in prosodic respects that superiority to Continental versification in Latin on which English scholarship has since justly prided itself. The In Anglum Gallicw lingua affectatorem (the bete noire of all good English students at this time, from More to Ascham), the fine thoughtful In Hujus Vitce Vanitateni —

" Damnati et morituri in terree claudimur omnes Carcere " —

the Ad se gcsticntem Lcetitia in the same sense, and the pleasant pieces to his old love and to his children, — show More at his best here, and deserve no mean place in the general Anthology, which has yet worthily to be made, of this Renaissance verse in Latin.

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winter and spring of 1515-16, and being first printed at Louvain in this latter year, went rapidly through three other editions, with revision by the author and his friends. These, like the first, were Continental — at Paris in the spring of 1518, at Basle in November of the same year, and at Vienna in 1519. It was also translated into foreign vernaculars long before it ap- peared in English, and it gave both its author and his country a very high standing with foreign Humanists. Perhaps on the whole the deserved reputation of More for character, his hapless fate, and the various traits in him which represent the Englishman of all but the very best type, have conciliated an undue amount of admiration to the book. More's humour shows excellently. The grave banter of the Introduction — on the different reports of travellers respecting the breadth of the river Anyder, the localisation of Utopia, and the attempts of some to make a " key " to the book and identify its characters with individuals — is not unworthy of a country which had already Chaucer to its credit, and was to produce Shakespeare before so very long, not to mention Swift and fielding. Peacock and Thackeray later. And this tone is kept up in the beginning of the book itself — the presentment of Master Raphael Hythlodseus or Hythlodaye,and the con- versation at Cardinal Morton's table. Nor are counsels wise and witty on divers points of politics and man- ners to seek throughout the text. But on the whole a political student may be justly doubtful about the mixture of the arbitrary and the unpractical in the scheme of Utopian economy : while the purely literary

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 89

critic, admitting it to be a good book, will hardly, from the literary point of view, admit it to be a masterly one. It is probably the case that all invented polities neglect human nature, unless (as Swift had the wit to see) their builders make them purely negative and satirical. But Plato can enchant us as critics even while we shake our heads as politicians : More hardly does as much.

All this, however, does not affect the fact that the book is a highly representative book. The dissatis- faction of the Renaissance with things existing, its harking back to old models, and its hankering after an elaborate, more or less socialist, system of state-educa- tion, state-interference, and state-management of every- thing— its tendency, in short, to despotism, whether of the monarchic, the aristocratic, or the democratic kind, appears eminently. Nothing — it is no news to students — can be a greater mistake than to present the spirit of the Renaissance as a spirit of liberty ; it was only a spirit of violent resistance to authority, which was used to make it do or believe what it did not like, and which prevented it from enforcing what it liked upon other people. And this, though religious toleration nominally exists in Utopia, is really the motto of Amaurot and its dependencies.

The spirit of Erasmus, reinforced with a stronger if

less delicate humour and a more definite partisanship,

The E istoise ^PP^^^^ ^^ ^ famous book wlicrc he himself

obscurorum figurcs uot unfrcqucntly by reference, and

at least once as an actual interlocutor. I

believe that superior persons, for the last generation

90 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

or two, have made up their minds that the Epistolce Obscurorum Virorum'^ are not really very amusing; and it is pretty certain that (as is the case with other less notable books of the period) they have dropped out of the reading of the average educated man. He cannot too soon return to them. The whole book is the result of many additions and afterthoughts. The Defensio Joannis Pepericorni, with its endless testi- monials from universities, and the so-called Lamen- tationes Obsctirorum Virorum, need only be read by those who wish to consider the thing from more than a merely literary point of view, though one or two things in the Lamentations are amusing. Nor has the third volume of the Epistles proper the pith and grace of its predecessors. These and the Eialogus Mire Festivus, in which Erasmus himself, Reuchlin, and Faber Stapulensis (Le Fevre d'Etaples) are brought face to face with three protagonists of the Obscuri, contain the root of the matter.

The book took its origin, as is not uncommonly the case with such things, from a long and rather vague quarrel, brought to a head by a particular incident. The Humanists in Germany, during the later part of the fifteenth century, had gained a considerable hold of the universities, and were known by the honour- able if not honourably bestowed nickname of " poets," from their new-fangled attention to metrical rules instead of to the old Latin rhythmed doggerel, and their enthusiasm for Virgil and others. They had

' I use the Teubner ed., 2 vols, sextodecimo, Leipsic, 1869. Book- ing's Hutten {v. infra) gives the best commentary.

THE HAKVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 91

raised among the monastic Orders and the older sort of University Masters, who had been brought up on logic and mediaeval manuals, a spirit of opposition both bitter and dogged. This grew, both in bitterness and in doggedness, by the identification of the Ee- forming element in its earlier stages with the studies of the Poets, and was further envenomed by re- sentment at the Humanist enormity not merely of reforming the study of Latin, not merely of adding thereto the troublesome novelty of Greek, but of actually proposing to pile Hebrew also on the hapless shoulders of the average magisternoster. About the year 1510, a converted Jew named Pfefferkorn, with the usual real or feigned trop de zhle of the neophyte, distinguished himself by declaring all Hebrew writings, except the Bible itself, to be anti-Christian and fit only for the flames. The great scholar Eeuchlin (1455-1522) entered the lists against him, and the matter became a sort of duel between the Faculty of Theology at Cologne, which was ultra-conservative, and Eeuchlin, to whose assistance came a group of young scholars from the younger University of Erfurt. Ulrich von Hutten, the best known of these (see chap, v.), does not seem to have contributed any of the best of the Epistolce (first issued 1515) which were mainly written by Crotus Eubianus (said to be the chief spirit), by the much-extolled Latin versifier Eobanus Hessus, and by a Canon of Gotha, Conrad Mutianus, who was a sort of minor Maecenas to the crew. They pitched upon a certain Ortuinus Gratius of Deventer, long a favourite theological teacher at Cologne, making

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him a friend (for reasons none too honourable) of Pfef- ferkorn and Pfefferkorn's wife, a mortal enemy of Eeuchlin, and a holder towards the minor Obscur- antists ot the whole of Germany of much the same position which Mutianus actually occupied towards the Erfurt " poets." These " Obscuri Viri " accordingly address to Ortuin letters, sometimes definitely and almost always indirectly touching on the Eeuchlin- Pfefferkorn dispute, scarcely ever missing a fling at Humanism, Biblical study, and the rest of the New Learning, but incidentally, and at great length, revealing their own ignorance, immorality, and general slovenliness of life and thought. The most obvious source of the fun (one which has seldom been neglected even by the greatest humourists) is the fantastic nomen- clature of the Obscuri — a nomenclature judiciously varied by quite ordinary designations, such as Conrad of Zwickau and Johannes Arnold, but constantly di- verging into the grotesque, from the moderate and probable appellations of Thomas Langschneyderius and Bernhardus Plumilegus, to the more farcical fancies of Cornelius Fenestrifex and Paulus Dauben- giggle. The next lowest, but still moderately used and ingeniously controlled, is the reliance on sheer coarseness of situation and language. In this the Erfurt men do not come near the common indul- gence of the fifteenth century in most countries, or the recrudescence of the same thing in the mouths of the Reformers ; but they are sometimes pretty free. Very much more respectable and more literary, is the delectable dog- Latin — a little but not much

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 93

further caninised from the later mediaeval pseudo- vernacular — in which the Obscuri write, and which, in the Dialogus Mire Festivus, is contrasted with the fairly Ciceronian and Terentian style of Erasmus and Eeuchlin. But above and beyond all these things are the genuine humour, the command of character, the mastery of that crowning satiric gift — the gift of making the enemy make himself ridiculous, the range of subject and circumstance, the access (as obvious as in the Colloquies themselves) to the as yet all but undis- covered and very rarely utilised stores of the matter and means of novel and drama.

These latter good things are absent from very few pages either of the original Epistles or of the Epistolce NovcB (1517). Sometimes, as in the very opening letter of the first batch and the thirteenth of the second, we have mock-solemn accounts of scholastic discussions of a certain kind : Whether you ought to say Nostermagistrandus or magisternostrandus, Whether it is possible, seeing that one member cannot belong to more than one body, for a man to be a member of more than one university. This last aporia, put by Thomas Klorbius, a humble doctor of theology (" Parcatis mihi," he dares to say to the great Ortuinus, " sed vos estis in- congruus "), is perhaps one of the very best and most characteristic of the whole. Elsewhere^ there is the parlous case of a short-sighted scholar who has mis- taken the black garments of a Jew for academical dress and has made obeisance to the Hebrew: of another ^ who has got into difficulties by drinking too many 1 Ep. 2. 2 Ep. 3,

94 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

canthari of cercvisia and then using the cantharus itself for purposes military and not civil. Bachelor Nic. Caprimulgius excuses himself^ for the practice ^convenient, no doubt) of writing " lady's Greek with- out the accents," by the example of the great Ortuinus, and others match Latin doggerel against the pedantic " metres " of the " poets " or quote impossible books, the twentieth ^neid, the fifteenth of the Ethics. Our reverend Master Conrad of Zwickau, with a sort of innocent impudence, admits ^ that he himself has not the gift of continence, but tenderly remonstrates with Ortuinus for unkind conduct to his fair friend — nay, more, he is mildly contumacious when Ortuin an- nounces his own repentance. Here^ we have the wicked deeds of an intruder who lectured on Pliny and other poets, and scofied at those who knew nothing but Peter the Spaniard and the Parva Logicalia ; who, in fact, was such a fifth wheel to the coach, or rather such a thorn in the side of his uni- versity, that the rector had him sent down for ten years. There ^ the inestimable Conrad of Zwickau intimates his latest flame for a certain Dorothea, who plays him evil tricks ; but for whom, to beat the poets at their own weapons, he composes a beautiful copy of elegiacs after this fashion —

" O pulchra Dorothea quam ego elegi amicam Fac mihi etiam sic qualiter ego tibi."

Most affecting is the tale ^ of the affection of Mammo- trectus Buntemantellus, Master in the Seven Arts, for

1 Ep. 6. 2 Ep. 9. 3 Ep^ 17^ 4 Ep 31. » Ep. 33.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 95

the bellringer's daughter, Margaret; most agreeable the argument^ of a certain Antonius, doctor in medicine, who dared to maintain to the great Erasmus his face that Csesar could not have written the Commentaries, because so busy a man could have had no time to learn Latin. And, indeed, we have seen authors deprived of their books in these very days on not much better grounds. The long account ^ by Magister Wilhelmus Lamp of his journey to Eome, with a com- rade whose conduct was far from becoming, is a most admirable piece of narrative, worthy, mutatis mutandis, of Defoe. And the same good person's subsequent^ discussion on points of prosody with an important member of the Eoman Curia is worthy of it, though perhaps not quite so pleasing as another letter * from Eome about the wonderful ways and sad death of tlie Pope's elephant, the beast that Emmanuel of Portugal gave to Leo the Tenth.

Among the most masterly touches is the picture ^ drawn by Henricus Schluntz of the mighty Ortuinus in his library. He is sending his master a book, but fears it may be ill taken.

Sed possetis dicere, Quare talis inihi mittit taleni librum ? Credit quod non met habeo libros satis 1 Eespondeo quod non facio propterea. Et quando putatis quod misi vobis talem librum propterea, tunc facilis mihi injuriam quia feci cum bona opinione. Et non debetis credere quod parvi- pendo vos quod habetis paucos libros; quia scio quod habetis multos libros. Quia vidi bene quando fui in stuffa

^ Ep. 42. ^ Ep. Nov. 12. ^ gp, ^ov. 35.

• Ep. Nov. 48. « Ep. Nov. 52.

96 EUEOPEAN LITEIIATURE — EAKLIEK RENAISSAI^CE,

vestra Coloniae, quod habuistis multos libros in magna et in parva forma. Et aliqui fuerunt ligati in asseribus, aliqui in bergamenibus. Et aliqui fuerunt per totum cum corio rubeo et viridi et nigro, aliqui pro dimidio supertracti. Et vos sedistis habens flabellum in manu ad purgandum pulveres abinde.

And it further seems that Ortuinus told his pupil that you might always know whether a man is learned or not by the care he takes of his books — a sentiment not discreditable to the corypliceus of the Obscuri, despite the disgraceful insinuation that Ms books might have been in danger of gathering dust for all the reading he gave them.

The etymological line is taken up elsewhere,^ the most ingenious example being the explanation of latus clamis as nomen dignitatis, derived from the practice of military tribunes throwing a metal clava or mace into the ranks of the enemy, the recovery of which was valiantly sought by the soldiers. Magister Abraham Isaac de stirpe Aminadab (evidently an analogue of Pfefferkorn) declares,^ with as evident sincerity, that he would rather have a living of a hundred florins and a simple damsel of twelve years old, at Deventer in his dear native land, than one of thirty florins and a cunning gouvernante of sixty in the High Germany. Marcolf Sculteti inquires ^ of John Bimperlenbumpum (who doubtless gave his name to a certain " powder of Pimperlimpimp ") what on earth is the meaning of this "Gabala" that they talk about, and which ap- pears neither in the CatJiolicon nor in the Gemma ^ Ep. Nov. 56. 2 Ep^ jfoY 66 3 gp. No^_ 69.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 97

Genimarum. And for a final touch ^ : " Ars dicitur a Grteco artos, id est panis: quia omnes qui sciunt artem aliqueni possunt acquirere panem et potum et aniictum." We learn, too, that the University of Erfurt, like all our universities in all our times, " meo tempore fuit in flore," and then had nothing to do with fantastic "poesy," but consisted of sound Aris- totelians and good Realists, with a famous notion of getting the better of Nominalism in argument.

I have given this flying sketch of some, but only a very small part, of the more amusing matter of the Epistolce, in order to throw some light on their most remarkable literary character. It will, I think, almost by itself (though all persons who love humour are most earnestly exhorted to have recourse to the original) show how well that original deserves the name in ref- erence to modern literature, not merely by the impetus administered to the elaboration of the great new kinds of drama and novel, but by the display of a variety of comedy which is itself essentially modern. In this last respect the Epistolce are a good deal in advance even of the Colloquia ; and it is not a little remarkable, and shows no small genius in the person concerned (whoever he was, Crotus Eubianus or another), that this spirit should be shown first in Germany. For the humour of Germany has always tended — and at this particular time tended more, perhaps, than at any one other — towards violent horseplay, extravagant coarseness, the "humour of the stick." That of the Obscuri Viri, on the other hand, is partly Lucianic

^ See the Commentum Mag. Nost. Schluntz, ed. cit., p. 409. G

98 EUROPEAN LITERATUllE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

and so not original. But it acquires originality by a considerable admixture of the fun of mere nonsense, to which, except in the Old Comedy, ancient wit, even in its most consummate exhibitions, was unluckily and unwisely averse. The differentia of modern from ancient literature is also well seen in the peculiar glancing or lambent divagation of the fun. The Epistolers are almost always coursing several hares at once, yet there is no real confusion. The Reuchlin- Pfefferkorn quarrel is never left long alone ; but it is dropped constantly, for the moment, in order to attack monkery, or the older and more obscurantist fashions of University life, or the mere and sheer degradation of scholarship by sensuality and sluttishness, or other things suited by their vivacity and reality to enliven the general picture. If we compare the book with such representatives of almost contemporary French and Italian humour as Gargantua ami Pantayruel and Mer- linus Coccaius, we can but be surprised to find that by far the most uncouth nation has turned out by far the most refined fun, relying the least on mere extrava- ganza and burlesque, and, if more limited than either, more academic than either likewise. Nothing could, perhaps, better show the enormous harm done (whether with or without compensation does not at the moment matter) by the controversies of the Eeformation in general, and in particular by the temper of the chief Reformed controversialists.

Sometimes, however, even Reformation pamphlets in Latin show something better than black gall and choler. There can be few livelier followin^s in the

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 99

footsteps of the Epistolce than the dialogue, or almost Eckiua drama, entitled Eckius Dedolatus,^ and pub- Dedoiatus. jigj^g^j ^bout 1530 (the first edition has no date), as a song of triumph on the Protestant side over the champion of Eome who had been, as the Protestants thought, so thoroughly unhorsed by Luther. It takes, as has been said, the dialogic- dramatic not the epistolary form, and nothing shows more forcibly that influence of Lucian which has been mentioned. The action is much livelier than that of any of the Colloquies; and the author, whoever he was, allows himself not only considerable licences of language but a good deal of fancy in his incident. In fact the thing shows more concentrated literary talent than any work of the time on the same side except Kirchmayer's {v. infra, chap, vi.), while its Eabelaisian and uproarious humour contrasts remark- ably with the grim intensity of the Fammachius. The story is that Eck, writhing under his defeat, and finding that copious libations (which are supplied by his Boy with asides of comic abuse) do him no good, sends for his friends, and, at their advice, to Leipsic for help. The messenger is the witch Canidia, who travels on her speediest he-goat, and by the same vehicle brings back Eubeus and a surgeon in woful plight. The surgeon declares that only the most lieroic remedies, and the actual knife, can save Eckius, and that he had better "make his soul" before tlie operation ; but the confessional scene is more curious

^ Ed. Szamatolski, Berlin, 1891. The ascription of the authorship to Pirkheimer seems not proven.

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tlian edifying. Then the unfortunate patient is strapped down, purged, blistered, bled, and subjected to more alarming operations still, in order to clear him of his evil humours and corruptions of all kinds — the mildest remedy being a severe thrashing {dcdolatio) and the severest one requiring delicate and distant allusion. The effect however is good, the naughtiness being effectually taken out of the papal champion, and the piece ends with one of the odd fasciculi of scraps — epigrams, orations, «fec,, common at the time. It is full of classical, even Greek, quotation, and obviously written by a scholar for scholars : but the authorship seems entirely a matter of guess.

It so happens, too, that though the much earlier

Facetiae of Poggio deserve the praise, such as it is, of

putting these tilings to the credit of Hu-

TAe Facetiae. . , , . , , „ .

manisra, the chief examples of sixteenth- century Facetice'^ that we possess are German. Ger- man stories had already taken, in such vernacular work as Ti/ll Fidenqnegel and the Kalerulbcrger^ a

^ The commentatory literature of the great story-collections, Latin and vernacular, is enormous, and in regard to the earlier ones it is barely necessary to name Wright, Loiseleur Deslongchamps, Oesterley, Comi)aietti, one scholar from each of the great literary countries. On this present subject special assistance will be found, by those who desire it, in that excellent book of Professor Herford's, wliich I have to mention always with honour, often with indebtedness, The Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century. Tliere is a neat little collection of the Facetiae of Bebel and Frischlin, with additions from others, starting with Poggio himself (Amsterdam, 1660). It may be observed here that the Grobianus literature is reserved for the chapter on German Vernacular.

" See The Transition Period, pp. 401-403.

THE HARVEST-TIME OF HUMANISM. 101

tincture of sheer nastiness which surpasses even that of the French Fahliaux themselves. Edification, there- fore, is much more to seek than to find in the work of Bebel, of Frischlin, and of others in Latin, not to mention Schimpf unci Ernst and other things in German. The pieces are indeed sometimes of some importance as preserving and handing on useful literary subjects and motives. In face, however, of the great development of the vernacular novella and conte in Italy from the Decameron to the Hecatommithi, and in France from the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles to the Heptameron, the importance of these Latin stories is considerably lessened; nor has their more or less classical style the interest of the barbarous but piquant Latinity of their predecessors. For all the gros sel that he allows himself, it is curious to contrast the comparative stolidity of Bebel with the piquancy constantly given by Erasmus to much less auto- matically laugh-provoking subjects.

It would be improper to close this long chapter

(which should, however, have been longer still in

order to do justice to the subject) without

Letters. "' J /

a slight further reference to the Latin correspondence which forms so important a part of the literature of the time. In the case of many of the great men mentioned or to be mentioned — Erasmus, More, Bembo, Sadolet, and others — in the case, indeed, of almost every man of importance in our special period, letters written in Latin form a more or less important part of his literary work, besides supplying data almost more important for

102 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

his own biography and the history of the time. A considerable part of these letters, indeed, consists of barren formalisms and compliments, couched in an artificial would-be Ciceronian style, and of no more pith or substance than the declamations of the School Ithetoric. But a great 'part also is as vivid and as interesting as any one can reasonably desire, par- ticularly in the case of Erasmus. Yet even in this department the handwriting on the wall appears, as where, for instance, we find Ascham beginning his career as a letter-writer in Latin, even when he is writing to ladies, and ending it in English, even when he is writing on public business. Such a fact speaks for itself, and what it says is Mene, Tekel. It may still suit Barclay, nearly a hundred years later, to write even the Argenis, the first of " novels with a purpose," in Latin. It may, after another century and a half, still seem more proper and even easier to Johnson to state in Latin to his doctor the par- ticulars of the paralytic stroke from which he has hardly rallied. But these are survivals. The kingdom of Latin is passing and to pass' to the despised vernaculars.

103

CHAPTER II.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO.

ITALIAN LITERATURE, C. 1500 — THE ITALIAN LITERARY TEMPER — ARIOSTO — HIS LIFE — HIS WORK: THE MINOR POEMS— THE ' ORLANDO ' — ITS QUALITIES AS ROMANCE — DESULTORINESS— ITS SARCASM AND LICENCE — BRILLIANCY OP STYLE AND VERSE — STORY-CHARACTER — OF ITALIAN ROMANCE GENERALLY — ITALIAN HUMOUR -BOTH AS IN ARIOSTO — SCENES, PERSONS, AND PASSAGES — ARIOSTO's RANK AS POET, AND AS MIRROR OP HIS TIME — ARIOSTO AND RABELAIS — OTHER EPIC-ROMANCES — LYRICS : SONNETS, LA CASA— MADRIGALS AND CANZONI — ARIOSTO — MICHELANGELO— MOLZA — VITTORIA COL- ONNA — GUIDICCIONX — ITALIAN DIDACTIC AND BLANK VERSE — THE 'CAPITOLI,' ETC. — PROSE-WRITERS — MACHIAVELLI AND GUICCIAB- DINI — MINOR HISTORIANS — THE " NOVELLIERI " — BANDELLO — CINTHIO — FIRENZUOLA AND GRAZZINI — STRAPAROLA — MISCELLANE- OUS PROSE: LETTERS, DIALOGUES — ARETINO — MISCELLANIES OF GELLI, FIRENZUOLA, BEMBO, VARCHI, CAKO — CA8TIGLI0NE AND 'THE COURTIER.'

It is perhaps barely necessary to repeat the caution of the Preface that, as regards the subject of the present Italian litera- chapter, though of that only, the title of the iure, c. 1500. present volume is a frank and self-confessed misnomer. The first half of the sixteenth century, with in some cases, perhaps, a very few years at the

104 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

end of the fifteenth, undoubtedly constitutes the period of the Early Eenaissance in general European Litera- ture. But that period in Italian Literature hardly even falls within the limits of the volume which has preceded this. For Italy, as luck or ill-luck would have it, has always, and necessarily, stood in a dislo- cated position in regard to general European culture. One is sometimes almost tempted to say that Italy has no mediaeval period. The precinct of the ancient capital of the world, the patrimony of the modern Church, passed almost without a gap of twilight from Darkness to Renaissance. The latest of all European countries to achieve a real literature in the vernacular, Italy was by far the earliest to revive the study of the ancient tongues ; and this revival, notwithstanding that it brought about a more unintelligent and pedan- tic undervaluation of the vernacular itself than any- where else, ripened this vernacular at the very same time. When Erance and Germany already had a brilliant national literature, Italy had only a cluster of dialects, with little more than folk-song to serve them for record ; yet within a century at most she had far outstripped the rivals that had had so great a start of her. In the middle of the thirteenth century the rich and varied literature of France, the exquisite lyrics and wild or polished epics of Germany, were confronted, south of the Alps, by a beggarly array of formal poetry imitated from Provencal, of non-formal poetry that was mere folk-song. By the middle of the fourteenth, Italy, besides not a few minors, had three writers, one of whom was of the greatest of all

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 105

time, while the three together had brought Italian, in prose and verse, to a pitch of accomplishment which no other European language could rival for at least two hundred years to come.

It is, perhaps, not wholly philosophical to put down the comparative falling off at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, as has often been done, to the encroachments of humanist pedantry. This, no doubt, had something to do with the matter; but not all, nor even very much. The burst of the Trecento, in fact, did for Italy in two or three generations what was done for the rest of Europe in two or three centuries, and the falling off after it was simply the phenomenon corresponding to the com- parative decadence and sterility of all Europe during the same fifteenth century. But the Italian dead season lasted for a shorter time, and broke once more into spring and summer with a brighter though briefer luxuriance, for reasons connected partly with the character of the earlier flourishing itself, partly with the occupation of the interval. The period from Dante to Boccaccio had been too short to exhaust the literary faculty of the nation ; and the attention bestowed upon the classics by the Humanists had inevitably if unwillingly reacted upon the equipment of the vernacular. When there began that wonderful after - bloom of seventy or eighty years, the later period of which falls to our lot here, the Italians settled once more to the production of literature, with advantages in all but one respect far superior to those possessed by any other nation wl>atsoever. To take

106 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

Politian or Pulci in the earlier, Ariosto or Machiavelli in the later half, and compare them with Rabelais or Ronsard, with Surrey or even with Spenser, far later than the latest whom we notice, is almost like com- paring a modern astronomer with the possessor of an astrolabe. The Italians had a language somewhat lacking indeed in strength, but already tuned and tempered to the utmost possible pitch of melody and music. All important metrical problems were con- quered for them ; their grammar, if not formally, was practically fixed ; their vocabulary was as wide as they wanted. Prose, which was struggling into being in England, and still much unformed in France, had with them already reached comparative perfection. They were rather behindhand in drama, but in every other kind they were ahead, and in tale-telling very much ahead, of all other peoples. Lastly, they had been acquainted for a hundred years and more with a very large portion, and for a considerable time with practically the whole, of the Classics, whence they could derive at once instruction and example. Mean- while the Frenchman to some extent, the Englishman to a much greater, had to struggle with something like a complete change of language, with prosody never fully formed, and rendered almost useless by the change of language itself, with an unconstructed grammar, with a vocabulary which still wanted feed- ing up to the utmost in every department of thought and matter. Before we can, as has been so often and for the most part so unsatisfactorily done, attempt to compare Ariosto and Spenser, we must remember that

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 107

while the Italian is not more original than the Eng- lishman in point of matter, his inherited advantages in point of form are to us almost inconceivable. He has everything ready to his hand — language, metre, gram- mar, fashions of handling. Spenser has to do almost everything for himself — to forge the very tools that he uses, to cut down the very trees with which he builds.

It is possible that in his admirable Italian Litera- ture Mr Symonds, perhaps from less acquaintance The Italian with the othcr parts of the subject, has not literary tcmrer. ^^^-j.^ f^^y allowcd for the euormous ad- vantages possessed by the Italians of this time. But he has not allowed one whit too much for the literary character of the Italian temper, its sense of beauty, its eye for proportion and harmony, its wide range and acute power of selection, its inherited justness of con- ception and expression. These qualities are so strik- ing, so unmistakable, that one cannot be surprised at the rank which, not at one time or in one country only, has been allowed to the Italian Literature of the Cinquecento. Yet of its defects there cannot now be much denial. That the eighteenth century, and even to some extent the earlier nineteenth, regarded Italy as the home of Eomance, came of course only from the fact that, not entirely by their own fault, the men of those times did not know what Eomance was. Of the three great elements of that great thing — Variety, Mystery, Passion — the Italians indeed possessed the first in amplest measure ; and if they were a little deficient in the third, they made by no means a bad

108 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

substitute for it out of that sublimated sensuality which is really a sort of naughty twin-sister of Pas- sion herself, an Anteros not wholly opposed to the better Cupid. But of Mystery they knew nothing, though they were quite aware, and very fond, of its caricature, Marvel. The Romans themselves had had very little sense of the mysterious ; even the Greeks can hardly be said to show it strongly ; and the whole course of Italian civilisation, especially the fatal familiarity of the Italians with a debased official Christianity, had served as a preventive to the impor- tation of the most precious of gifts from the North, Even in Dante it can hardly be said to be present iu any other sense than this — that as the greatest poetry is universal, it penetrates this region also. The dread countries of his voyage are all countries of mystery, of dream, yet the commonest of criticisms is, that though he never makes them prosaic he always makes them practical, real, objective. The very Beatific Vision is hardly vague, the descent on the wings of Geryou has the precision of a lift. He can do this without ever even approaching prose ; but others cannot, even in his time, much more two hundred years afterwards. If there is a touch of mystery anywhere in the Italian Eenaissance, it is in the Hypnerotomachia, which is but a survival of medieeval allegory. The Italian poet of all times, more or less, of this time particularly, can sing exquisitely, say con- summately, see unerringly ; but he cannot dream.

" On a work so well known, and so universally read, as the Orlando Furioso any observations would now be

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 109

superfluous." So wrote Eoscoe a century ago, and if he was right then, they might seem likely

Ariosto. rt T-k

to be plusquam superfluous now. But Eoscoe was not writing an ostensibly literary history ; he was merely citing such aspects of Italian litera- ture as he thought likely to illustrate the story of his actual subject, Leo the Tenth, and likely also to re- quire expounding to his readers. Moreover, there are very good grounds for doubting whether the Orlando at the present moment is exactly "well known" and " universally read." That every educated person knows of it may be assumed, and some at least of its famous episodes — the island of Alcina, the journey of Astolfo to the moon, and a few more, are no doubt vaguely known to everybody. Yet a person of very good education, not ignorant of Italian, has been known to confuse Alcina and Armida ; and I should rather like to try an intellectual company after dinner with such questions as, " What was the second heap of rubbish which Astolfo found ? " " What dress had Alcina on when she came to visit Kuggiero ? " not to mention such minuter and more recondite ones as, " What were the different fates of the sons of Marganorre ? " or " What was Eodomonte's reply to the novella of Giocondo ? " However this may be, the propriety of " making observations on the Orlando " here will hardly be contested, and if they seem voluminous in proportion to the size of the book or the chapter, there is, as in the case of Rabelais, a very complete answer ready. Not only are these two writers the greatest writers of their time from the point of view of world-literature,

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but their books happen to be quite extraordinarily representative of that time, and, moreover, to supple- ment each other in the most extraordinary degree. There is hardly more than one important feature of the Renaissance, the singular combination of voluptuousness and melancholy, that they miss. All the rest — its seriousness and its irony, its hopes and its cynical conviction of their folly, its freethinking and its enthusiasm for humanity, its reaction against asceticism, and its passionate love of visible, audible, degustable, odorous, tangible beauty, — all are in these two.

Lodovico Ariosto, a Ferrarese by extraction and education, and member of a more than respectable family, was actually born at Eeggio, of which his father was governor, in 1474. He was intended for the law, but, like many others, left it for literature, a desertion which seemed likely to have awkward consequences when, at the age of six-and- twenty, he found himself left with a rather small independence and a family of nine brothers and sisters to provide for. He discharged this duty most credit- ably, however. Everybody who was anybody in the small states of Italy in those days expected some State provision, and received it to an extent which is still rather puzzling when one remembers that Italy has never been a rich country. Ariosto's first endowment, the Captainship of Canossa, was more interesting from its associations than on quarter-day ; and when he was nearly thirty he became a confidential officer of Cardinal Ippolito of Este, brother of the Duke of

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. Ill

Ferrara. It seems that he might have had good benefices if he would have taken orders beyond the lower degrees. Ippolito has had the usual ill-luck of the great when they happen to be served by the greater — that of being extravagantly flattered by his servant and extravagantly abused by posterity. He seems to have been a very typical Italian prince of the time, with no morals, quite ready to put his brother's eyes out because a lady thought them handsomer than his own, and exceedingly unlikely to think of anybody else's interests unless it was quite convenient to himself. In two agreeable quali- ties, bravery and good looks, he also resembled his class ; in a third, which they not uncommonly pos- sessed, he seems to have been rather deficient. But we cannot all be good critics, and it is on the whole desirable that if a man does not like a thing he should say so. At any rate, whether Ippolito uttered the famous query ^ about the Orlando or not, he probably got the copyright secured to the author, and even, as Mr Symonds says pleasantly, bought a copy himself for one whole lira marchesana.

After being in the service of the Cardinal for some fifteen years, Ariosto transferred himself to that of Ippolito's brother, Duke Alfonso. He had to travel

1 "Dove diavolo, messer Ludovico, avete trovato [oi" pigliato] tante — " and then what ? The sentence is traditionally comi)leted in three dif- ferent forms, all expressing "rubbish," "rot," but ranging in coarse- ness from coglionerie through minchioneric to cabellcrie. Roscoe, with the robustness of his generation, gives the usual (I can hardly say the consecrated) form ; Mr Symonds drops diavolo, and takes in one place one, in another the other, of the milder substantives.

112 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

now and then, but for the most part resided at Ferrara, with a good salary and handsome allowances. In 1522 he was made governor of the Garfagnana, an out-of-the-way and brigand -infested district, which office he held, to his great discomfort, for three years. Then he returned to Ferrara, married (somewhere about 1525) a widow, Alessandra Strozzi, whom he had long loved, revised the Orlando unceasingly, and died of consumption, June 6, 1533. Personally he seems to have been extremely amiable and agreeable, and was (by his own and his natural son Virginio's testi- mony) fond of turnips.

Ariosto's work ^ falls into three well-marked divi- sions : the minor poems, epistles, satires, capitoli, &c. ; jiiswork.-The the plays ; and the Orlando. The plays minor poems, ^j^]^ ^^ dealt with in the general chapter on the European Drama of the period. The minor poems have been extolled as extremely important for Ariosto's biography and private character. One would, of course, rather that he had not in them grumbled at the patron whom in full dress he went out of his way to load with fulsome praise ; but this is unluckily very natural and very usual. Elsewhere the tone of these poems, though as amusing as we should expect, seems to me, I confess, to be rather conventional. From Horace and Persius downward there have been two satiric manners: — one that of

' Editions very numerous. I use of the Orlando, which was first printed at Ferrara in 1516, a 4to containing likewise Dante, Petrarch, ami Tasso, dedicated to Goethe at Leipsic in 1826 ; of the Opere Minori, Lemonnier's, Florence, 2 vols., 1894.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 113

the easy well-bred or would-be well-bred man of the world who suspends everything on the adunc nose and occasionally scratches with still more adunc claws; the other that of the indignant moralist reproving the corruptions of the time. Both have produced good work, and Ariosto has contributed' not a little of it, mainly in the former key, but once or twice in the latter. But there is something, as usual, of the histrionic in either manner. The best passage is also the best known, that in which the poet describes his interview with Leo X. after the Pope's elevation to the Holy See. They had, it seems, been intimate friends and almost brothers before the Wheel of For- tune had carried Leo to the very top. Nor did the Pope, like some bad men, forget his friend. On the contrary, when Ariosto went to see him at home, he kissed him on both cheeks, pressed his hand, granted his request for securing his copyright, let him off half the fees (but some say this was for some small beni- fice, and we are usually told that Ippolito had got him the printing rights earlier), and — permitted him to walk down in the rain to his inn and eat his supper there. This is quite admirably told, and the excuses which the poet makes for the Pope are consummate morsels; but it is a pity that he allows the passage to tail off into the stock copy-book reflections that honours and riches do not bring tranquillity of mind. To be esteemed an honest man is true honour. Most trite if most true. And from Messer Ludovico, of all people, we do not expect ignoring of the fact that it is not absolutely impossible to possess honours

H

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and riches with tranquillity of mind ; that you cer- tainly do not secure this by not possessing them ; and that it is quite as easy for an honest man to enjoy his honesty pliis dryness and a good supper at the Pope's table as to wrap it in a wet cloak and feed it with the food of inns at his own expense. His vexa- tion, or the conventional obligation of the form, lias here and elsewhere made him succumb to an evil influence from which he is generally free enough — the influence of Cant.

In his great work, whatever other objections may be made to it, this malign goddess is most conspicu- ously absent, while nobody pretends that

r;ie Orlando. *'. .,, ,.,

the minor poems, satirical or other, display a tithe of the poetical power which reigns in the great romance. To it, therefore, let us turn. It may, de- spite what has been said above, be assumed without much rashness that readers are aware of the fact that it is a continuation of the great and long strangely undervalued poem of Boiardo on the same subject. And as Boiardo himself has been fully treated in the last volume, there is no need to do more than repeat that the Orlando Innamorato, though nothing like so accomplished a poem as the Furioso, displays a truer spirit of Eomance. On the other hand, in adjusting the story rather to " an arioso key " our poet has avoided the extreme burlesque of Pulci {v. also as above). Although he sometimes shaves the burlesque very close, he never actually touches it, and of the enormous body of verse which Italy has composed on the ultimate base of the French Carlovingian epos,

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 115

with a strong draft upon the Arthurian legend and the miscellaneous adventure - pieces, his essay tran- scends all others.

Critics of that ancient school, still too numerously attended, which regards it as the first of critical duties Its qualities as to construct elaborate classifications, to Romance. copy their subdivisions upon labels, to stick the labels on, and to exhibit the result to tlie world as criticism, have decided that there are, in Italian at least, five kinds of epic, romance, or narrative poetry, to wit: Eomantic proper. Epic or Heroic proper, Burlesque, Heroi- Comic, and Satiric. And they gravely tag to the Orlando the epithet Romantic, without, it may be allowed, the slightest danger of contradiction, but also, it must be regret- fully added, with the least possible illustrative or informative result. Of course the Orlando is a Eomance in any and every form and sense of that scarcely univocal word, though in some senses more than others. But what we may legitimately and advantageously investigate is the further question, What kind of a Romance is it, not by label, but in quality ?

The unprejudiced but not unintelligent reader who has a fair acquaintance with Romances already will probably, before he has got far in his read- ing of the Orlando, begin to make up his mind that, whatever else it is, it is an exceedingly dcsidtory one, and he will, at least possibly, not change his opinion when he gets to the end. But here again he will be taken up by some at least of the

116 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

critics, who will assure him that for all its apparent vagaries the Orlando has really one main plot never lost sight of, in '.he brini];inc; together of Euggiero and Bradamante as fabulous ancestors of the House of Este ; that additional plots or, as Chaucer would say, " knots " (they confess that they are less pervading) are provided by the Siege of Paris at Paynini hands and (now and then) by the title-incident ; and that violently as the action appears to waver and see-saw between different adventures in East and West, the transitions are really managed with consummate skill. It is possible that on these points some such readers may remain unconvinced. They will say that the ancestor-legend, though a recognised commonplace of " regular " epic poetry subsequent to Virgil, is a poor thing at best, and that it here is nothing more than a sort of extended Dedication by which the obligatory flattery of patrons, instead of being concentrated in one place, is spread over the whole work ; and that though Bradamante certainly does displace Angelica as heroine (so far as there is a heroine), Ruggiero, till close before the end, can only be called a hero because he is rather oftener on the stage than any one else. Of the Siege of Paris they will say that it is a mere occasion for striking episodes — the best of them the famous single-handed incursion of Eodomonte — and that the poet cannot, and evidently does not, expect us to take interest in it as much more than a back- ground. The Madness of Orlando they will not merely pronounce episodic, but deny it much in- terest, except at the beginning (where the effect

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 117

of the ever -new discoveries of the name of his rival, coupled with Angelica's, is very finely and powerfully imagined and described) and at the end in the rescue-operations of Astolfo. But most of all, perhaps, they will demur to the praise bestowed upon the transitions. Nay, without blaming Ariosto in the least for adopting the method which he chose to adopt, and which has given a charming result, they may refuse the name of transition altogether to what is in reality a mere sandwiching (generally without so much as butter and mustard to make a kind of cement to the parts of the sandwich) of Levantine and Ponen- tine adventures. They may even contrast the way in which Spenser effects his intertwinings of the different strands of his story, to the very great advantage of the English poet.

And those who take this line need not despair of Ariosto's own approbation, for he himself never seems to take the subject seriously. However this may be, it is certain that some at least of those who enjoy the Orlamlo most keenly, and not least critically, do not care one jot whether Ruggiero marries Bradamante or not, and are only interested in the Siege of Paris, on the sportsmanlike principle of backing your own side. And the attraction, to them, can be quite critically accounted for. If Ariosto took only a business-like and courtier-like interest in his general story, he took the keenest, the most craftsmanlike, the most masterly interest in the particular stories which he grafted upon it. In such a case, and with such a person, one can never be entirely sure how far the poem as it exists is

118 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

the result of any definite plan. When Ariosto took up the unfinished story of Orlamdo from Boiardo's hands, we are not necessarily to suppose him actuated by any cut -and -dried scheme. These things shape themselves in the hands of men of genius even more than they are shaped by them.

But it may be said, " How about the sarcastic inten- tion of the Orlando?" To which, perhaps, the best answer is, that we shall do well to con-

lU sarcasm . i i • , i i

sider the sarcastic expression rather than the sarcastic intention. The common fallacy of sup- posing that a man who sees the ludicrous side of a thing or person necessarily despises and probably dislikes that person or thing, has worked ill in this instance also. That Angelica, at once the cynosure and the prize of the world, after being doted on by, and playing with, the most peerless of peers, should throw herself into the arms of a good-looking nobody, is hardly even severe " criticism of life." Tlie thing is life : the only thing to be said about it is that the poet has been exceedingly kind to his coquette, and that few Angelicas are lucky enough to find such unobjec- tionable Medoros. That Orlando's prowess should lead to nothing but jealousy and madness, only not com- monplace because they are in excess, and that he should be brought to his senses, or rather his senses to him, with the aid of physical punishment and subjec- tion, is not bitter satire. It is simply acknowledgment of quite usual fact, consistent with the highest concep- tion of the romantic.

That Ariosto himself had this highest conception

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 119

need not be contended — would, indeed, be absurd to contend. As an Italian of the later tliough not latest Renaissance, he could hardly have had it. Tyranny and profligacy in the upper classes of the State, servility and profligacy in the lower, cor- ruption and unbelief in the Church, hardly made an atmosphere genial for a quest of the Sangreal or even for a Court of Gloriana. But his view is not by any means such a low view as it is sometimes taken to be. Even his much - talked - of immorality may seem (though it is always dangerous to take up the cudgels for a defendant on this score) to have been not a little exaggerated. Let it be remembered that even Spenser himself shocks the pudibund nowadays, though Spenser's morality and his religious fervour are absolutely beyond question or suspicion. Of course Ariosto goes beyond Spenser, who would certainly not have given admission to novelle like that of Giocondo, and would have considered the young person a little more, if not in the history of Alcina and Euggiero, at any rate in that of Eicciardetto and Fiordispina. But it may be strongly contended that the Ariosto of tlie great poem has here found but an ill friend in the Ariosto of the clever comedies. That they are tainted with an always disagreeable and sometimes disgusting moral or immoral tone, need not be denied for one moment. But the Orlando itself seldom goes beyond the mildly naughty, and not often beyond the simply voluptuous. In particular it must be again strongly urged that the most offensive characteristics of Italian licence, the positive nastiness and the admixture of

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cruelty with lust, are all but entirely absent from the Orlando. Its Venus may be of the earth earthy, but she is never of the mud or of the Devil ; al- though she may have too much of Pandemos, she has nothing of Pandemonium. Lastly (for one may justly love to get objections over), the charge of flat- tery may be at once admitted, deplored, and dismissed to come up for judgment when called on. It is very disgusting that great poets should flatter Augustus or Alfonso, Ippolito or Cromwell, and they are the worse men for doing it. But they are by no means neces- sarily the worse poets, and it is as a poet that we are dealing with the author of the matters in -erie, which so did surprise Ippolito himself.

To pass to the merits. In the very first place has to be put the extraordinary attraction of Ariosto's Braiuincyof stylc and versification. Of his mere lan-

• tyU and verse, g^^gg jj. jg ^^ ^^^^^ j^gg^ l^fj. ^^

Italians to speak. They have been (not, of course, without right, considering their history) among the most punctilious of European nations on this head, and while it would hardly become any foreigner to enter the lists with them on such questions, it is an important fact that in regard to none of their great writers has there been such an agreement as in regard to Ariosto. There have been times when even Dante, even Boccaccio, did not meet the severe requirements of Italian Academic prudery : Petrarch has, in native taste to some extent, and still more in foreign, escaped criticism chiefly on the dangerous ground of " fault- lessness " ; with Tasso we are to some extent already

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 121

in the presence of decadence. But Ariosto, Ferrarese as h^ was, has very nearly united all suffrages at home, and practically all abroad. Moreover, strictures on Patavinity are almost proverbially barren.

With style proper, and still more with versification, we come to more interesting and safer ground, for here the orbis terrarum is the secure judge. When purists in England tell us that Chaucer might have selected a better dialect than he did, that Shakespeare's English is not quite correct, that Dryden wants a stricter and purer grammar, we say, if we are wise, " Perhaps," and pass on. The style of all these admits no question, nor does Ariosto's. Its excellence must be apparent to any one who can appreciate style at all, as soon as he has acquired Italian enough to understand, even not yet in minntice, the mere words of the poem, Not Virgil, not Racine, not Addison, produces the effect of complete and easy mastery more thoroughly: and there is something in Ariosto which does not appear in any of the three. To say that he is never prosaic, would indeed only be true from a special point of view, but no other limitation is possible even p^^ima facie. The ease, the variety, the interesting quality of his narrative manner have probably never been surpassed.

But to some tastes at anyrate it is the excellence of his versification, that articulns stantis ant cadentis poeseos, which is his greatest charm. The Italian hendecasyllable has many merits ; but some at least of these are derived from a quality which hovers con- stantly on the border of defect. Even in its strict form with the feminine rhyme, and still more when

122 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

that rhyme is extended to the sdrucdolo variety, it is just a little too skipping — it has a constant tendency to reduce itself from a five- to a four-footed line by sinking intermediate syllables, or if it takes the five accents, not to charge them with quite sufficient gravity. And this is specially the case when it is arranged in stanzas that terminate with a couplet. Among the almost innumerable evidences, major and minor, of Dante's poetical supremacy is his adoption (his invention possibly, but it really does not matter) of the terza rima, from this special point of view. The rhymes recur as the whole nature of the language de- mands that they should ; but the constant break in their recurrence arrests the skip and pirouette — the slight "tumble" even — which is natural to them, and at least assists the poet to achieve his unsurpassed and seldom matched gravity, resonance, and echo. So the sonnet and the sestine, to take Petrarch's most suc- cessful forms, arrest the " tumble " by a still greater intricacy of recurrence. And though in the canzone tlie rhyme in pairs is strongly present, yet it is not single as in the ottava — its effect is largely conditioned by the varying length of the lines, and the much greater length of the stanza. Yet it may be doubted, with infinite submission to Dante's expressed judgment, whether the peculiarity on which we are commenting is not a slight blot on the supremacy of the canzone itself.i

^ It was probably some unconscious consciousness of this defect of the hen decasyllabic couplet which made the Italians prefer the form of sonnet which does not end with it. As no similar defect attends

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 123

However this may be, the ottava of hendecasyllables, with all its merits, imdoubtedly does fall short, in sincerity and gravity, of the forms most natural to compare with it — the English Ehyme Eoyal and Spenserian. This last, as has been shown not merely by its inventor but by poets so different as Thomson, Shelley, and Tennyson, is probably the greatest stanza in the world for serious poetry, though it also may have the opposite defects of its opposite qualities. Ehyme Eoyal is inferior to both in com- pass, and very greatly inferior to the Spenserian in power; but it has its own merits, and in what has been called " plangency " has no superior.

Ariosto, however, was almost bound by custom to use the ottava, was, like Dryden and some other very great poets, not a man to take the trouble of inventing when a good thing was ready to his hand, and, more- over, was by nature thoroughly disposed to the lighter touch and motion which this stanza invites. Yet it never tempts him (as it had tempted Pulci, and has tempted Pulci's English and French imitators), to give a merely burlesque touch to his verse. The undulating movement of the lines, whether in individual verses or in tlie octaves, is so exactly suited to his purposes, that there is hardly any tone, among those that he

the English decasyllabic couplet, the objection which applies to Italian does not apply to English. Had this consideration been present to the minds of those critics who, one after another, depreciate the Shakespearian form to exalt the Petrarchian, and even go to tlift preposterous length of refusing to the former the name of sonnet at all, they might have been saved from an absurdity which has found only too docile following.

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wants to give, that he cannot give to it. He never does want to rise to Dante's highest or even to his higher levels, yet such passages as the immortal

" Vattene in pace alma beata e bella,"

the epiphonema to the chaste spirit of the self-martyred Isabel, show that, with a different purpose and a very little more effort, he might have come much nearer to Dante himself. While as to his manage- ment of verse in the lighter keys there are practically no deniers. In ordinary ^ description, in mere narrative, in gravely sly innuendo, he is admittedly supreme.

As regards the individual line we have the advantage of being able to compare all the four greatest poets of Italy ; as regards the octave, a comparison of Ariosto with Tasso will suffice. As compared with Dante we shall find that Ariosto's line is very much more " enjambed," so that, while it loses gravity, it attains swiftness. It may be said that it is not fair to com- pare the inscription on Hell-gate to anything in such a poem as the Orlando, yet the passage quoted above on Isabella's death is not so entirely out of keeping with it as to be incomparable. Of the nine lines of tlie Inscription- not one really runs on, three end witli full stops, five with lesser stops but with full comple- tion of sense, and the ninth (1. 7) with no stop, but in-

^ One must add " ordinarj'. " Spenser beats him easily in liis greatest efforts here, and many who have never read or perliaps heard of Lessing's quarrel with the })ortrait of Alcina, must have anticipated the German critic.

^ See Dr Moore's ed., Oxford, 1897. Variations in others are trifling.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 125

eluding a proposition in itself complete. In the eight Hues of the apostrophe to Isabella's soul, the second, third, and fifth are "enjambed," and only three end with a real break. Nor, I think, would the contrast fail, however often it were applied ; while it applies almost equally to the central pauses. The contrast with Petrarch is something of the same kind, though Petrarch is more prodigal of " enjambed " lines than Dante. It is, moreover, complicated by a fresh feature, resulting partly no doubt from the difference in subject, for it appears much less in the Trionfo than in the BSme. This is Petrarch's occasional — nay, frequent — addic- tion to an antithetical arrangement o^ verse, in which the second half balances the first or returns upon it,^ instead of the resistless and unbroken march of Dante's line, or the undulating progress of Ariosto's. But the contrast of the versification of the Orlando and that of the Gcmsalemme is specially interesting, because it is double, in stanza and in line, because the subjects of the poems are so similar, and because there is no great, if there be any appreciable, difference in the age and stamp of the language. These things should make for a great resemblance, and do actually make for some. But the differences are almost as remarkable, if not quite so staring, as the resemblance. To say that Tasso's verse drags, would be not only uncompli- mentary but false. I have amused myself by opening the two poems alternately at a venture in divers pairs of places, and comparing the first lines of successive

^ How great the effect of this was on Elizabetjiau poetry all Rtudents of that poetry should know.

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batches of stanzas. Over and over again you will find in Ariosto stanza after stanza in which the first line runs straight and pauseless from beginning to end, very likely with not even a stop at the end itself. This may be sometimes found of course in Tasso also, but far less frequently ; and even when it does occur, the lines move slower than Ariosto's. And this is all the more remarkable, that Tasso avails himself more frequently than his great predecessor of the licence of running one stanza into another ; so that it is clearly not intentional.

The characteristics thus indicated, and others — interesting but* too long to trace — result in a poetic medium which for its special purpose simply cannot be surpassed. Ariosto does not attempt to hobble or check the skip, even the pirouette above referred to, nor does he try to disguise it by running the stanzas on. But by keeping it well in hand he gives to both line and stanza the freest action, an agile grace of movement which is inexpressibly pleasing. With him, as with all the greatest poetic masters, however much one may enjoy the meaning, it is a constant delight from time to time to let the meaning take care of itself, and to listen to the music of the verse as one listens to running water or rustling trees, allowing the cadences to shape rather our own dreams than anything that they have to tell us.

But for those wlio do not feel this charm, as well as for those who do, he has story enough to tell. Those who, even more unreasonable than ^Mrs Martha Buskbody at the end of Old Mortality, are uncomfort-

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO, 127

able unless they know not merely what happens to the Guse Gibbies of a tale after its end, but what happened to them from the date of their appearance in this world up to the beginning of the fable, may indeed require to be referred to the Innamorato or to some analysis of it ; others need not be so particular. It will be sufficient for them to know certain general outlines — if even those — and then to abandon them- selves to the poet's guidance.

Great pains have been spent on the origin of what

we can hardly call the Italian cycle of Romance — it is

too late, too unoriginal, and too irregularly

story-character. •,!« t ^ ni

furnished tor that — but may call the trans- formation or travesty of the Charlemagne story, on which so many great Italian wits exercised them- selves. In Dante's time the far greater Arthurian Legend seems still to have had the chief attention in Italy, if indeed it was not Dante's own unerring wit and poetical enthusiasm which made him write, not merely the Francesca and Paolo passage in the Iti- ferno, but the less generally known reference in the Be Vulgari Eloquio. But Arthurian matters were rather too high for the Italians ; and it is certain that at a very early date poems of the Carlovingian cycle had not merely been known in Italy, but had actually {v. supra, p. 67) assumed a sort of Macaronic form between French and Italian. The controversy, if there ever was one, between the two " matters " of Trance and of Britain had been settled by the date of the Beali di Francia (v. The Transition Period, pp. 388- 390). Thenceforward the Italians half borrowed, half

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shaped for themselves a new "matter," in which the various stories of invasion of Spain and Italy by the Emperor d la barhe florie and his Paladins, together with the not particularly dutiful behaviour of those Paladins to Charlemagne himself, the treason of the house of Mayence, and the almost independent position of that of Montglane in resistance to the Saracens, were combined with elements borrowed from the Romans d'Aventure ^ rather than from the Chansons de Gestes or the Arthurian stories,

Further, in this new, rather sophisticated, and even bastard, but ingenious development, there appeared Of Italian ^^^ ^®^ fcatures, one perhaps suggested, Romance the other certainly original. Tlie first of genera y. ^^j^ggg ^^s that multiplication of mere wonders which is noticeable in the Amadis cycle,^ and which was not impossibly suggested to the Spaniards and Portuguese by their Eastern inter- course. The popular connection of giants, witches, dragons, enchantments, and the like with romance is due to the fact that, from the sixteenth century onwards, the true old romances became mainly un- known, and for some three centuries in France and England the Italian rococo substitute was held to be the standard. In the chansons de gcste the miraculous element is purely religious, and in the Arthurian story it is always more or less connected with the Legend of the Graal. There is hardly a trace of the

^ See The Flourishing of Itomance, chaps, iii., iv., vii., and The Four- teenth Century, chap. i.

' S^ The Later Renaissance, p. 127 sq.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 129

kind of conjurer's supernatural, the Jack-the-Giant- Killer wonders, which are rife in the Amadis and the Italians, and which, from them and from other late fifteenth-century work, affected Spenser to some extent.

The new element, which is found nowhere pre- viously, is the peculiar and rather bourgeois comedy, the Voltairian touch, as we may call it proleptically, which is flagrant in Pulci, present even to some ex- tent in Boiardo (though less in him than in any one), incessant, though quietly managed in Ariosto himself, and pushed to various degrees of avowed burlesque and grotesque in writers like Berni, Folengo, and Forti- guerra. This, we say, is quite new. There is much more comedy in the Chansons de Geste than those who have not read them suspect ; but it is of the hard Teutonic order. The "japes" of Sir Dinadan and others in the Arthurian story are not frequent, and are always of the simple, almost childish, mediaeval kind ; while Amadis and Palmerin are guiltless of humour. The Italians, on the other hand, thrust in their own peculiar variety of the humorous at almost every moment.

Appreciation of this quality may vary. It may

well seem, for instance, to some even of those who

can thoroughly and pretty equally appre-

Itedian hummir. . . . , i -r • t^

ciate Aristophanes and Lucian, Jirasmus and the Obscuri, Eabelais and Moli^re, Swift and Fielding and Thackeray, that the much -vaunted Margutte passages of Pulci are a little rudimentary in conception and a little exaggerated in execution ;

I

130 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

and that while work like Folengo's is of course ouly to be judged according to its own rules, it can never receive a very high place. But in Ariosto we have this narquois tone adjusted as nearly to good taste as it ever can be, and never pushed to a mere sneer, much less to a mere guffaw. That Messer Ludovico definitely intended to satirise Eomance, that he had even as much anti-romantic intention as Cervantes (who had not very much), is more than doubtful. His position, allowing for difference of time, nation- ality, and the like, resembles that of Chaucer in Sir Thopas, but is one of more complexity and refine- ment. In so far as he is a satirist at all in the Orlando, he is satirising much rather those generous but also half-witless and impossible impulses of human nature, of which the Romance is a delightful expres- sion, than that expression itself. Tlie universally known opening distich is perfectly valid : he does sing, and sing without any perfidious intention, ladies, and knights, and arms, and loves, and courtesies, and deeds of bold emprise — only, as he sings, the seamy side of it somehow occurs to him, and he lets us know that it does, and how it does, by certain masterly side- touches.

Universally known as they may be, however, it may be doubted whether sufficient attention has really been Both at in P^id to thcsc two liucs. For they indicate, Ariosto. ^j^(j indicate justly, the desultory character of the work itself. It has been pointed out above that there is very little evidence of really sustained pur- pose: it is much if the poet's great art can hide the

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 131

pillar-to-post character of his story. But, as we have seen, it does hide that character, and that is quite sufficient.

In perusing the book the reader will derive very little assistance from the so-called argomenti. These inscriptions are much longer than Spenser's much-ridiculed doggerel quatrains, and not nearly so quaint ; but they are considerably less in- forming— a fact, no doubt, partly due to the much greater length of the Ariostian canto. There is, how- ever, perhaps, some intention in the way in which, in the first two cantos, the attention of the reader is skil- fully shifted from Angelica, the practically dethroned heroine of the Innamorato, to her successor, Brada- mante. The flight of the former from Kinaldo and her adventures in the forest are mere ordinary roman- d'aventures work ; the defeat of Pinabel, his treason to Bradamante, and her consequent introduction to the wonders of the tomb of Merlin and to the future of her own race, are real business, promising at least some connected thread of story. And it is worth observing that Ariosto handles his frequent introductions of con- temporary personages and history with a skill which distinguishes him from almost all other poets. The second-rate part which Orlando plays is largely re- deemed by the vigour and splendour of the passages where he does appear. Mr Symonds has rightly dwelt on the singular skill with which the two different battles with the Ore are managed, though one may doubt about going with him to the full extent of admiring Ariosto's elaborate similes. These things

132 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

always have the drawback of suggesting a deliber- ate following of Homer, and, as a rule, this is the only way in which they do suggest Homer. But the simile is the superstition of the critic, who wishes sometimes, if not always, to remember the ancients.

Again, in regard to Euggiero, the poet has sur- mounted, with that usual and curious felicity of his, the natural tendency of intelligent man-

Persons, ■, • ■, ^ pit -r->

kind to hate a successful hero. Euggiero is, indeed, not the most interesting of the knights on either side, — of that more presently, — but we never dislike him. His entanglement with Alcina, his designs on Angelica, excite in us none of tlie feel- ings of contemptuous loathing which the dealings of ^neas with Dido excite in every generous breast ; and if Marfisa had not turned out to be his sister, we could, in spite of Bradamante, have tolerated his philanderings with her. On the other side, Eodomonte is perhaps less sympathetic than Turnus, as he is infinitely less grand than Milton's Satan. But he clearly did not mean (if he had known what he was about) to cut off Isabella's head, and there is some- thing refreshingly sensible as well as just in his rally against the commonplace slander of the Host's Tale. It is more effective, though less genial, than the anonymous English excuse —

" Some be lewd, and some be shrewd, Yet all they be not so."

And this brings us to the enshrined novelle, which

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 133

are such noteworthy features of the poem. They

have too often shocked the grave and the precise:

they are too often incapable of adaptation as furniture

of books for the young. But they are sometimes

very amusing, sometimes really pathetic, and almost

always quite admirably told. Whether introduced

as episodes or frankly thrown in as mere told tales,

the passages which are suggested by the names of

Giocondo, Fiordispina, Genevra, Lidia, Marganorre, and

many others, display the author's powers of narrative

verse at their very highest. One is, indeed, almost

tempted to say that they, even more than the rest

of the poem, put him at the very head of all poets

'as a mere raconteur. No doubt a poet ought to be

much more than this ; no doubt Ariosto might with

advantage be much more than this oftener than he

is. But this he is, and without losing sight of

poetry — a thing that can be said of few.

It is difficult, where there is so much to charm, to

fix upon the most charming passages, but many of

them have already been indicated in pass- ant? passn^es. . I'll A •

mg. i do not think that Ariosto shows at his very best in fights : it seems to be generally acknowledged, even by his greatest admirers, that he has nothing in this way equal to the great duel of Orlando and Agricane in Boiardo. Nor, unless we give it very great odds for its originality, will the island of Alcina obtain advantage, or even bear the comparison, when contrasted with Tasso's garden of Armida or Spenser's Palace of Acrasia. In the former case the poet's heart does not seem to have

134 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

been enough in the matter, for Ariosto was never a practical soldier, while in the latter he is not quite dreamy enough. Now the dream -element is of the very first importance in such descriptions, both in sav- ing the ornamental from the touch of the tawdry, and in saving the voluptuous from the smirch of the indecent. Morpheus is unabashedly sensual ; but he has some strange charm against the obscene. On the other hand, in the general description of enchanted palaces and castles, hippogriff- rides and the like, Ariosto is quite infallible. His irony, while it is never tedious and teeth - on - edge - setting, entirely saves situations of this kind from mere childishness in the first place, from the too businesslike and so dull detail of the Amadis cycle, and from the third danger of "overdoing it," into which his great follower, Spenser, has been often led, partly by his devotion to Allegory and partly by a following of such originals as Arthur of Little Britain.

On the whole, however, we may probably return to the Thirty-fourth Canto, with the matter belonging to Ariosto's rank it at the end of the Thirty-third, as the as poet, finest, though not the most beautiful pas-

sage of the poem ; to the loves of Angelica and Medoro as the most beautiful, or, at least, the most exquisitely pretty ; to the epitaph on Isabella as the noblest and least tainted with either worldliness or cant ; and to Eodomonte in Paris as the most ambitious on stock lines ; reserving the Giocondo story as the farce of the pentalogy, and claiming for it the excuses and licences of that position. And, for some at least, the first

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 135

named may be pointed out as probably the greatest of all. It has character — Astolfo is much more of a per- son than most of the knights — sufficient but not exces- sive purpose, criticism of life in quantity and force enough to satisfy the veriest devotee of that test of poetry, a magnificent and quintessential power of adapting style and verse to subject, and, last of all, that peculiar blend of laughter, seriousness, and some- thing as nearly approaching tears as an Italian of the Renaissance could feel, which constitutes Humour. Now, humorous poetry, if equal stress be honestly laid on the substantive and on the adjective, is one of the very rarest of kinds, and when it is found in quintessence there is perhaps no reason for refusing it rank among the greatest. As, then, Ariosto has at least in this supremacy ; as he is very nearly if not quite supreme in more than one other respect ; as it may almost be said that he never fails, and that this freedom from failure is not due to tame faultlessness or a cowardly abstinence from the most difficult attempts, — it will go hard but we must rank him, at lowest, just below the very greatest of all.

Such a place is, I believe, his right, even on the calculus of those who refuse the historic estimate, or .a?id! as mirror at Icast admit it witli grudgiug ; but for his- ofhis ume. ^^^y ^iQ has cvcu morc claims and interests. It has been said that with Eabelais he represents the greatest literature of his time, penetrated most fully by the extra-literary as well as the literary character- istics of that time ; and it may be added not merely that few times have been so thoroughly represented,

136 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

but that few have ever so thoroughly lent themselves to representation. The Renaissance is of those periods which are not at all simple and which are also not exactly genuine, resembling in this respect rather the society of the Eoman Empire or that of the present day than that of Greece or of the Middle Ages. Its typical man was distracted by many preoccupations. His so-called paganism and his still real though some- times rebellious submission to Christianity; his enthu- siasm for classical literature and philosophy and his scorn for things mediaeval ; his vague sense of the won- derful gains that science and discovery and commerce might bring ; his religious and political restlessness ; his educational fury — all these things pulled him this way and that way, and left him no definite or single course. But they were all derived, to a great extent, from literature, taken "from a printed book," and therefore the printed book could reproduce them. Ariostoand Eabclais naturally does the reproduction Rabelais. under different conditions from those which act upon Ariosto : he is fresher, more unsophisticated, less troubled about the beautiful, and more about the good, an enthusiastic believer in humanity, and (in a way which for very good reasons he is careful not to define too closely) a believer in God. Ariosto has upon him the polish and the pressure of a much older civilisation, and especially of a much older culture, while the miserable conditions in Church and State which had so long affected Italy could not fail to affect him: yet though he displays little or no enthusiasm except for things lovely to see, and soft to touch,

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 137

and sweet to taste and hearing and smell, this most genuine passion of the Eenaissauce makes him at least no pessimist. He laughs at humanity, but he quite tolerates it ; some readers can see no active or aggres- sive free -thought in him. His motto is, "Enjoy"; and he does not seem to doubt that there is ample enjoyment for everybody, at least everybody about whom an educated gentleman need trouble himself, in sight and in sound, in book and in picture,^ in wine and in meat, in the beauty of woman, the amuse- ment of adventure, the good things generally of the universe. He will even heighten the possibilities of amusement with Ores to fight and Hippogriffs to ride, with magic rings and horns and lances to give variety and range, just as he added " vinegar and wine sauce " ^ to his beloved turnips.

For the expression of the less aspiring but more elaborately enjoying mood of the period in such verse as he has given us we may be most profoundly thank- ful— even the grave and precise may surely say Vat- tene in pace to his soul. He has not, like Eabelais, mixed with his expression elements which puzzle or revolt the ordinary reader ; even his much-talked-of immorality needs, as has been said, a Pecksniff or a Podsnap to make very much fuss about it. He is eminently uncontroversial : save on the moral ground just mentioned, a man must be suffering from litigious

' Let it be remembered that he definitely mentions both the writers and the painters of his time in elaborate passages.

^ This may seem an odd mixture : it was probably a sort of sauce au bleu. Those with whom turnips do not disagree should try it ; and if it makes them write more Orlandos so much the better.

138 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

monomania ' who picks a quarrel with Ariosto about anything. And so it happens, with a pleasant poetical justice, that he whose creed was this, " Enjoy," has actually provided, for reading posterity to all time, perliaps the maximum of unmixed enjoyment that any poet has ever succeeded in offering.

This examination of by far the greatest of the Italian chivalrous romances or — neither to urge the other epic- word Controversially nor to omit it with romances. g^ suspiciou of purposc — cpics, whcu taken in connection with those given of the fifteenth-cen- tury poems in The Transition Period and of Tasso in The Later Renaissance, may probably dispense us from minute criticism of any other. The second place in our special period is undoubtedly occupied by the Orlando Innamorato of Berni, a rifacimento (and not the only one) of Boiardo's poem, which long usurped the place of the original. Francesco Berni, who was born at the classic spot of Lamporecchio in 1490 and died in circumstances of some mystery in 1536, will appear more than once in this chapter. The characteristic which gave his name to a special style of burlesque is sufficiently obvious in the poem ; but the ignobility of the travesty hangs about it, and it is by no means certain tliat we have not re- ceived it in a garbled condition. Bernardo Tasso of Bergamo (1493-1569) should have had the privilege

^ It must, however, be sorrowfully admitted that this disease seems to be rather common, when one sees even the late Mr Symonds drawing a face of nineteenth-century horror at Ariosto for allowing his armed and charmed heroes to butcher so many peasants and Saracens.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 139

(so common in poems of our kind) of seeing his posterity in a magic glass. He might then have thought it wiser to rely on his son for his place in poetical history. He was a gentleman and a man of worth in every way, with a talent for versification which he used only too freely. But his enormous Amadigi, in which, for the space of some 60,000 lines, he turned into verse the Amadis story, rather as it appears in Herberay's French form (indeed he wrote it at Paris) than in the original, and added some sprouts of his own brain, is but with the Africas and the Fucclles. Gian-Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550) cannot be said to have added much of an additional hold on literature to his Sophonisba {v. chap, vi.), his critical work {v. chap, vii.), and his publication in the vernacular of the De Vulgari Eloquio, by his ambitious Italia Liberata da* Goii, blank in verse and blank in interest. The Florentine Luigi Alamanni (1495-1556), who also will recur, was a better poet than Bernardo Tasso or than the author of the Sophonisba ; but his // Giron Cortese and Avarchide, the first of which versifies one of the best, but far from the best known, of the later incrustations on the Arthurian cycle, are not more original and much heavier than the Coltivazione (v. infra, p. 148 sq.). The names, for- gotten in this connection at any rate, of Brusantini, Pescatore, and others too many to mention,^ are con- nected with the expression of different incidents in the accepted Orlando series, or the appending of

^ For some of them see Dr Garnett's Italian Literature (London, 1898), p. l.'SS.

140 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

continuations, or the prefixing of introductions to it, in measure probably as abundant as the innumerable jointings of the original gestes themselves. Even the Ricciardctto of the already mentioned Fortiguerra or Forteguerri (1674-1735), nearly two hundred years after our time, may possibly not close the endless series in which, if any hero or heroine of Boiardo or Ariosto has missed any possible development of his or her career, he or she may justly complain of unjust neglect.

It is both natural and interesting to turn from Epic to Lyric, and there is, as it happens, an excellently Lyrics. Sonnets, representative collection ^ of the so-called La casa. lyrical work of twelve famous poets of the

sixteenth century, including such names of the first class as Ariosto, Michelangelo, and Tasso ; of the second, as Bembo, Molza, Vittoria Colonna, La Casa, Guarini; and of some others, ranging from Annibal Caro downwards. There is here a very large propor- tion of exquisitely accomplished work, and not a very small one of work that may be called exquisite, without any dubious addition. Of the Sonnets, of which it is very largely composed, it is of course difficult to speak too highly. Those of Michelangelo are now well known in England ; those of Giovanni della Casa (1503-1556) less so, in spite of the high and perfectly well-deserved praise which Mr Symonds has given them. If the

^ Lirici del Secolo xvi. Milan : Sonzogno, 1879. For thorough- ness, the selections must of course be supplemented by the complete works of the writersj but these are easily accessible. No country has cheaper editions of her classics than Italy.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 141

student of literature were not from his very freshman- ship broken to the eternal contrasts of humanity, it might seem incredible that the author of the niggling and sniggering obscenity of the Capitolo del Forno could also be the author of the great Sleep Sonnet —

" O Sonno, o della queta, umida, otnbrosa " —

which was probably the direct ancestor of the divers beautiful things on the same theme that our own Elizabethan sonneteers composed ; of that beginning

"Mentre fra valle paludose ed ime";

and of, perhaps, the best of all, as it is the best known —

" O dolce selva solitaria, arnica " —

to which not a few others out of no great total might be added. Of the/wror arduus of Michelangelo's com- positions in this kind there is no need to speak ; but throughout, these poets are well at the height of this, their own and their greatest poetical invention as a form. Even merely pretty talents like that of Caro can extract the ultimate prettiness from it, as others almost the ultimate grandeur ; and even the rather scholastic and rhetorical elegance of Bembo acquires some touch of nature as it celebrates that crin d'oro crespo of Lucrezia, a tress of which is said still to be in existence irradiating Bembo's manuscripts.

But Sonnets, as the strictest critics have always contended, and as all but the loosest must admit, are dubiously and by allowance lyrics, if they are lyrics at all. And when we turn from them to the more strictly

142 EUllOPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

lyrical constituents of the volume, the Madrigals and Madrigals and the Canzoni, it is here that we find some- canzoni. ihma wanting. Outside of Michelangelo

(who here, as elsewhere, " sways as he thinks fit The universal monarchy of wit ") the burden, if not exactly the curse, of the artificial is over all. The Italian Canzone, with all its merits, is, like all very elaborate and largely planned lyrical forms, especially liable to this, and few of the authors now under consideration escape it, though they may show it in different ways. The elaborate art of Bembo, that first Tuscan outside Tuscany, reveals to us, through its veil of rather thin perfection of form, the excessive Atticism which the story alleges to have been detected in the non-Attic Theophrastus, the quality in the Latin of Livy which is thought to have constituted its Patavinity in the eyes of Pollio.

Ariosto was a much greater poet than Bembo, but

the very quality of his greatness might prepare us to

expect some disappointment in his lyric

Ariosto.

work. He could not but be smooth, and in his madrigals is often not merely smooth but light. These are good qualities in lyric, but they are not the highest : they make the butterflies, not the eagles and the birds of Paradise of the lyric tribe. Still less do his sonnets attain to perfection. The chief thing noticeable in them is the anacliplosis, the repetition of the same word or words in successive lines or at more or less regular intervals, which was eagerly caught up by our Italianising Elizabethans, and which indeed

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 143

seems something of a genuine Italian device, inas- much as it is found in Lucilius two thousand years ago.

Michelangelo has been mentioned more than once, and it is now pretty fully and pretty generally re- cognised that he escapes the faults of his

Michelangelo. ,

contemporaries. That even those contem- poraries should have seen the real greatness of his " uncouth " verses (as, surely with some exaggeration of " correctness," they have been called) is perhaps even more an honour to those contemporaries than to himself. But one may be permitted to doubt whether the state of those foreigners who hardly perceive the uncouthness, but do perceive the poetry, is not more gracious. This nearest approach to a universal master of the Higher Fine Arts (for Eossetti did not add sculpture or architecture to painting and poetry) has as a poet that quality of poetical sound which forces itself upon the appreciation almost independently of the meaning, but in increasing measure as the mean- ing is felt. A hasty retort may be made : " Is not that simply because of the natural music in Italian ? " but this would entirely miss the point. Nearly all Italian poetry is smooth and musical, but the poetical music which has just been referred to is of quite a different kind, and, in particular, is quite independent of mere smoothness ; nor is it by any means common even in the greater Italian poets. Dante has it, of course, pre-eminently, and, to descend a very long way from Dante, it is present in those

144 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

sonnets of La Casa which have been referred to. In the lighter keys Ariosto has it pretty constantly, in the graver very seldom, and it is by no means universal in Petrarch or in Tasso. Probably the Madrigal —

" Come puo esser ch'io iion sia piu mio ? " ^

would be ranked among the uncouthnesses by the purists, yet this very first line, rough as it is, gives the poetic password at once. Such things transform the commonplaces of erotic into the uncommonplaces of poetry, as here —

" Quella pietosa alita Che teco adduci con gli sguardi insieme,

Perle mie parti estreme Sparge dal cuor gli spirti della vita."

The thing is not new ; it has been said a thousand times before and since, but here it is said consum- mately.

The Sonnets, which are more generally known, ex- hibit the same quality. One of the secrets of this form is the mysterious opportunity it gives to the practitioner of striking as it were in the very first line a key-note which rings all through the piece. No other language has ever caught this so well as English. Our great sixteenth -century practitioners of the sonnet mastered it almost at once ; it is even present to some extent in the experiments of Surrey

^ This phrase is a favourite one with the poet. It recurs in another ardent piece of the kind, that beginning —

" Un nume in nna donna, anzi uno Dio.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 145

And Wyatt, unmistakable in Sidney and Spenser, and carried to its very highest possibilities by Shakespeare. Michelangelo at his best has it excellently in

"Non so figura alcuna immaginarmi."

The last word explodes, with a sort of double effect of sound and light, all over the sonnet-scene.

Not much of this will be found in the far less mas- culine luxuriance of Molza (1489-1544), the laureate of the Ninfe Tiberine — courtesans of Eome j but his sonnets have at least sufficient sweetness and a prettiness which is perhaps the most intense and peculiar to be found in the class. Gener- ally the sonnet is either something much more than pretty or something a good deal less ; but the " sugar- candy " effect which is sometimes (more irreverently than untruly) ascribed to Italian can suffer this trans- formation also. And there are few prettier sonnets with a touch of that real pathos, which almost makes one repent of using the word " pretty," than Molza's on his dead mistress —

"La mia Fenice ha gia spiegate 1' ali."

The pathos and the prettiness are not absent from his canzoni, but these more ambitious and elaborate com- positions require (as Dante, their great eulogist and almost creator, had seen and said) something more than these amiable qualities.

In the collection of Lyric poets which for con- venience sake we have taken as text, only two of the very numerous poetesses of the time, Vittoria

K

146 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

Colonna and Gaspara Stampa, find admission ; but vutoria ^ third, Veronica Gambara, with a more Colonna. copious representation of the two just named, appears in another volume of the same collection, the Eime di Tre Gentildomie} Even the amiable " weight for sex," which all critics who are not curmudgeons concede, has not given Gaspara (who died for love), or Veronica, any very prominent or permanent place in poetry. But Vitto- ria Colonna (1490-1549), partly by borrowed, but also by authentic, light must always shine. Her beauty, her rank, her touching fidelity to an idol which was certainly not quite worthy of her worship, the adora- tion with which she was regarded by some of the greatest of men, her character, acknowledged to be without stain, not merely in one of the most profli- gate, but in one of the most libellous ages of the world — all these things have swelled, and justly Bwelled, her fame. But it would not be small if it rested on her poetry alone. If not entirely religious, it is very mainly so, or else devoted to the memory of her husband, always invoked nnder some metaphor or synonym of "light" {lume, Sol, fiamma), and so of a religious turn. The fitness of the sonnet for this purpose is unquestioned, and Vittoria's sonnets are perhaps superior to those of any other poetess except Miss Christina Eossetti.

The rather abundant work of Giovanni Guidiccioni (1500-1541), a correspondent of Molza and of most men of letters of the time, does not rise much above

^ Milan, Sonzoguo, 1882.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 147

the average; but he is sometimes happy in the fan- tastic treatment of commonplaces, which

Ouidiccioni. . • -i ^ mi •

this style permits with advantage. Ihis little madrigal, for instance, is certainly what all have thought, but what not many have expressed so tersely and so lightly : —

" Veramente in aniore Si prova ogni dolore. Ma tutti gli altri avanza, Goder solo una volta, e perder poi Tutti i diletti suoi, E viver sempre mai fuor de sperauza."

Economy and completeness of phrase, joined to a certain accompaniment of rueful-playful music, could not be achieved much better. But his sonnets are too full of cliches: in hardly any instance, I think, does he achieve that opening detonation of plangent or splendid promise which has been noted ; and he is irritatingly prone to that " stopped beginning," as we may call it, which Milton himself adopted rather too freely, and which some of our modern sonneteers abuse still more. The qualities which have been praised in La Casa's Sonnets are not absent in his Canzoni. In one the always difficult subject of senile, or at least not youthful, love is treated with singular force, and in almost all there is blood in the heart, and not merely wind in the pipe. The accusations of unreality and artificiality brought against the " Pe- trarchists " of the sixteenth century cannot be wholly put out of court ; but there are large and splendid exceptions to be made.

148 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

A little collection of the Italian didactic poets of

this and the next age,^ containing the Coltivazione

of Alainanni,^ the Api of Eucellai,^ the

Italian Didactic ^^ a i y-, ct-iiti-

and Blank Fodere of Tansillo, and the Orto of Baldi,** ve^-se. ^-jj g|^,g ^g ^ good tcxt both foF Hoticing

this class of poetry as it shows itself at this time and in this country, and also for saying a few words on Blank Verse in Italian — all the poems mentioned, except Tansillo's (which is in terza rima), being in versi sciolti. We cannot, on reading the Coltivazione and its fellows, be very grateful to their composers. That such pieces should be written was an inevitable result both of the general style and trend of Italian critical thought, and of the ever-increasing idolatry of Virgil. For had not the ancients in general, from their admittedly second - oldest poet downwards, allowed and practised the style ? And had not Virgil written the Georgics ? Therefore it is very

^ Venice, 1786, with extremely pretty engravings in the French style.

'^ Alamanni, besides the epics noted above, and some dramatic work, l)erformed, like almost all the Italian writers of this time, poetical exercises of the usual miscellaneous kind, from sonnet to elegy and from epitaph to hymn.

^ Giovanni Rucellai (latinised as Oricellarius) was born at Florence in 1475 and died fifty years later. He will reappear in the dramatic chapter.

• Luigi Tansillo, 1510-1 r)68, was a Neapolitan. He began at an

early age with a "poetic licence," the Vendevimiatorc, and ended, according to etiquette, with a Lagrivie di San Pictro. He was a dramatist of some merit, and wandered in didactic poetry not merely to the farm but to the nursery (in La Balia).

^ Bernardino Baldi, a little later than the rest (1553-1617), was an abbate, a linguist of some merit, and a hardened didactic poet, original and translating.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 149

probable that even if the Italians had been backward, the other literary nations would, all the same, have engaged themselves in the path which leads to poems on the Sugar-cane and " Come, Muse, let's sing of rats." One may therefore turn over these Georgics with a certain languid interest, and can allow a livelier feeling at the skill with which Alamanni in particular (who takes his subject most seriously and allows him- self most room) emulates, and sometimes approaches, the ornamental digressions of his pattern. The style adds a distinct feature to the literary presentment of the time. It is also valuable as exhibiting what no incompetent hands (for Alamanni and Tansillo at least were among the most accomplished verse-smiths of their day, and Kucellai must have had a touch of originality in him to enable him to launch the long series of "Eosmunda" tragedies) could do in Italian with a form of verse capable of accomplishing such magnificent results in other languages.

It will probably, however, not take long before even a cautious critic will be tempted to ejaculate, "This will not do ! " In the first place, the mind forebodes, and the ear soon confirms the foreboding, that the iambic - trochaic hendecasyllable is not suited for rhymeless verse. It is true that the Latin hendeca- syllable is a very delightful thing ; but then the cadence of Latin is not the cadence of Italian any more than the cadence of Anglo-Saxon is the cadence of English, and the central dactyl of the Latin verse gives it a spring and throb where the sameness of the Italian feet can only lollop or crawl. In the second

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place, and more damagingly still (for the genius of the right poet might cure this defect), another and an almost insuperable one occurs in the shape of that uniformity of termination which makes Italian rhyme at once peculiarly easy and peculiarly necessary.^ Whether the effect is the same to the native as it is to the foreign ear one would not attempt to say or judge. But to the latter this effect is that not merely of a teasing tangle of incomplete and accidental rhymes, but (which is much worse) of a positive lUhris of rhyme that is attempted. Every now and then (as an example taken haphazard from Book II. of the Coltivazione, p. 49 of the edition cited, will show) it is that of a completed tercet, with first and third rhyming all right, but with second left "in the air" with nothing in the succeeding to answer to it : —

" Che 1' soverchio aspettar soverchio offende : Parte di mille augei diveuta preda : Parte a 1' estivo sol s' astringe e' ancende ; E' 1 gih, tropjjo maturo in terra cade.'"

Indeed, turning leaves hastily from the versi sciolii of the Api to the continuously printed terza rima of the Podere, a careless reader might for a moment fail to perceive the change.

But neither of these things would be quite fatal, if one special peculiarity of the hendecasyllable did not marry itself to another peculiarity of at least a large

^ Aud it is unnecessary to say that this same ending in English blank verse has to be managed, if not with the greatest parsimony, at any rate with the greatest economy, in order to prevent a slovenly and down-at-heel effect.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 151

portion of Italian verse. The secret of complete success in blank verse, which was hidden even from Marlowe, but which Shakespeare discovered and taught to Milton, is that combination of variety in the pauses and the cardinal syllables by which the paragraph- or blank -verse stanza is sculptured, or rather built. Now great variety of pause is, as has been pointed out already, not an Italian character- istic at any time. And the termination practically bars the most important syllable in the whole line from serving as a hinge or springboard at all. With rhyme the music of the rhymes itself leads from one verse to another, and can be used by the poet as a link ; without rhyme the hendecasyllables slip off, one after another, into the inane.^ In other words, and to put it briefly, the secret of blank verse is symphonic effect ; and the continuous feminine termination with- out rhyme is fatal to symphony.

Mr Carlyle suggested, in a well-known passage, that

any person who, for just professional purposes, was

forced to read a certain book, should

The Capitoli, <£c. i ■, ,r • . i

forthwith apply the Mosaic rites and times of purification to himself. The advice would apply better still to the Ojjcre Burlesche, which Graz- zini (or " 11 Lasca ") issued in its revised form at Florence in 1548, which has been repeatedly printed since,^ and which, by no means to the credit of Italian

^ It is worth observing that even the decasyllabic verse-paragraphs of Beaumont and Fletcher, though often full of poetical beauty, ara not seldom spoilt by the predominance of redundant syllables.

' My copy is in three vols., Usecht al Reno, 1760.

152 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE,

literature, occupies, as no other book of the kind does in any other, the position of a classic. That the Capitoli and other pieces in which Berni, first of all and chief of all, disports himself with, as rivals or followers, La Casa, Caro, Firenzuola,' Bronzino the painter, -Molza, and others, down to Aretino, are in many cases (not quite in all) deliberately obscene, is not the real head and front of their offending. It is the peculiar nature of this obscenity which makes them a disgrace to their writers and almost to the country which not only produced but ad- mired them. Many writers, from Aristophanes to Eabelais, and some later than IMaster Francis, have said things not as they ought and as they ought not. But the worse side of the Bernesque licence, a side which unfortunately has never been entirely unre- presented since in literature, is almost new. To illustrate an awkward subject with the least offence, and to make comparisons with the utmost justice possible, we may take, to compare with Berni and La Casa, not the Titanic excess of Aristophanes or Rabelais themselves, not the musical and many- coloured sensualities of the Greek Anthology, but the much less admirable and more questionable licence of Martial. The epigrammatist is, no doubt, peccant — very foully peccant — in this kind. But he may

^ Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1546) has received high praise in some histories of ItaUan literature, but it is not easy to point to any single work of his that justifies it. He will recur as a dramatist and novelist, but it " doth something 8j)eak him " that his chief Italian reputation is founded upon a paraphrase or rehandling of Apuleius, which is regarded as a word-book of pure Tuscan.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 153

plead, not merely literary skill and grace, a lightning wit, and a brevity which prevents his ofience from being rank and stale as well as foul in itself, but also a certain virility and gusto. In this crew of Italian academics there is no virility, and the gusto, such as it is, is utterly morbid.

Perhaps the most fatal thing that can be said against them is that the Aretinesque foulness in their own midst is positively less offensive than the deli- quescent and sniggering suggestivenees, the long- drawn-out equivoques and suggestions, of the usual capitolo. In fact, though Berni undoubtedly had great literary gifts, he may almost be said to have introduced the snigger into literature, and directly or indirectly to have taught it to Voltaire and Sterne. Even his most famous pupils north of the Alps had the grace (if such a word may be used in such a connection) for the most part to make their touches of this kind rapid and momentary. The Italians dwell on their nasty ideas, roll them with relish over their tongue and mind, chase them through the involutions of hundreds of lines in terza rima or other form, decline them as if they were precious irregular verbs, through scores of variations of innuendo. Except for the brilliancy of the versification and style in Berni himself and a few others, there is nothing vivid or vigorous in the whole composition, nowhere a flash of passion, hardly any- where a touch even of hearty laughter. It is simply Rhetoric gone wrong ; the always pedantic, and often positively dull, application of trope and figure and technical elaboration to a very limited selection of

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indecent ideas and images. Except to sworn students of literature and history, the reading of these things can be recommended to no mortal ; but to these they are certainly valuable, as indicating the kind of putrefac- tion which it is not entirely easy to understand, but which had settled upon the Italian intellect. And they may perhaps be positively useful to create a violent appetite for purely moral and virtuous literature — for tracts, sermons, goody-goody stories, hymns, or any- thing which, while it cannot possibly be duller than they very often are, shall, at any rate, and at all costs, be clean.

The qualities of the Italian prose of the period are

curiously, and we may almost say affectedly, contrasted

with those of the verse. Too much of the

Prose-writers. i ti i

latter seems deliberately to caricature the critical doctrine (which, as we shall see, was by no means that of most critics of the time) of the im- portance of form in poetry, and to read it as if it enjoined attention to nothing but form — as if matter did not matter at all. The prose — in at least two great departments. History and short Tale-telling — some- times offers no particular attractions in style, but ranks among the most important divisions of the prose literature of the world for its substance, and for the qualities of composition which lie outside of style proper. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) yields to no prose-writer of the world in combination of literary and historic importance ; Guicciardini (1483-1540) is in a very sound sense the first of modern historians, no longer, like Comines, half historian and half

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 155

chronicler. Bandello, Cinthio, II Lasca, Straparola set at work half the dramatists of Europe, at once, and half its novelle-v/riters before long, and gave a mighty impulse to the tendency of all countries towards the completed novel. Even in more nondescript kinds the Gortegiano of Castiglione is but one of a group of books remarkable in all but the very first degree. Yet, as invariably happens, the characteristics of the verse reproduce themselves to a very great extent in the prose, and prose work seldom requires that detailed comment which is at least sometimes im- peratively necessary in regard to verse. It will there- fore have the smaller half of this chapter, but most certainly not as an indication of any contempt for it. The names of Machiavelli and Guicciardini are inseparably and in manifold ways connected, as con- Machiaveiu and temporaries, as friends, as joint revivers Guicciardini. ^f ^^^^ accomplishment of Italian prose which Boccaccio had splendidly originated, but which his successors had let slip, as historians or historical students of the strongly philosophical kind, as political philosophers even more remarkable still, and, lastly, as representatives, by no means wholly for ill, but certainly not wholly for good, of the very heart and soul of the Italian Renaissance.^ Both

^ I use for Machiavelli the handy if somewhat too tightly packed two-volume edition of the Opere Complete (Na,Tp\eB, 1878), together with Mr Burd's well-known and most remarkable edition of the Principe (Oxford, 1891). Lord Acton's introduction to this, and the abun- dance of editorial apparatus, make it almost a Macluavellian encyclo- paedia in little ; but it is needless to say that the literature of the sub- ject is enormous. Prof. Villari's Life and Times of Machiavelli is the

156 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

were men of action as well as of the study. Guicci- ardini was at different times ambassador to great Powers, governor for the Pope of important places, member of the Council of Twelve, &c., while Machia- velli had even greater diplomatic experience. But there is a wide difference in the range of their literary faculties. Guicciardini is known only as a prose- writer, and his prose does not go beyond history and its precincts of reflection, letter-writing, and the like. Machiavelli does almost everything, and does every- thing that he does do well. His very poems are not contemptible ; his plays (v. chap, vi.) deserve almost the highest place in the first flight of Italian comedy. His Discorsi sopra Tito Livio and his Arte della Gucrra have suffered, the first very little from the limitation of its ostensible subject, and the second not so very much more from the lapse of time and change of circum- stance. And if his Istorie Florentine are stigmatised

standard biography, and extends far beyond the person of the liero, deaHng especially with Guicciardini as welL In regard to the latter writer I must own that I have "preferred the galleys," and can speak of but a small part of him at first hand. This preference has become even more natural since the addition, during the jH-esent generation, of ten volumes of Miscellanies (Florence, 1857-1867), to the four old quartos of the Istoria d^ Italia, though the Storia Fiorenthui (written about 1509) has its admirers. It should be said that the most notable work of both writers is open to English readers in two volumes, trans- lated by Mr Ninian Hill Thomson, the Prince of Machiavelli (London, 1883), and The Counsels and Reflections (Ricordi) of Guicciardini (London, 1890). Macaulay's essay on Machiavelli has found favour enough in Italian eyes to be translated bodily in the edition of the Opere noted above. Macaulay was certainly a far better judge of Italian than of Fiench or of German ; but he shows his favourite habit of zebra- or magpie-painting too often here.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 157

as too rhetorical, he can write a crowd of minor things — dialogues, tales, letters, nondescripts like the life of Castruccio Castracani, almost anything, with vigour and brilliancy. The prolixity of which Guicciardini stands accused rarely damages his friend's work, and it cer- tainly is not chargeable on the questionable and almost endlessly questioned tractate which has given him his high though sinister fame, the Opuscolo de Principatihus as the author calls it in private, though he also himself refers to it by the title always used since, 11 Principe. It is fortunately no part of our business here to discuss, or to do any more than allude to, the numer- ous and sometimes extremely fantastic speculations on the exact drift of this treatise or the genuine opinions and principles of its author. But few people who know anything at all about the men and the books of the Eenaissance, whether in Italy or in France, in Germany or in England, in Scotland or in Spain, will find anything out of the way in Machiavelli's appar- ently scientific consideration, and on the whole approval, of the methods of Caesar Borgia, or in his equally scientific constitution of a non-moral virtue. In fact, it is hard to see how this difficulty can survive the reading of the Eeflections of Guicciardini, which, mu- tatis mutandis, preach exactly the same doctrine and tell exactly the same story. Nay, pass over the best part of a century and come to Bacon, and no very different gospel appears, allowing for the fact that Bacon is an Englishman and a man of the last stage of the Eenaissance, Machiavelli and Guicciardini Italians at its very centre.

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But the literary qualities of the Prince and its com- panions are ahuost of the highest, and those of the Istoria cCItalia are far from low. Guicciardini ad- mittedly has purity of language and accomplislunent of style, though his pages may be too many and his pre- sentation of action not vivid enough for a modern taste. There is a restless undercurrent of fire in Machiavelli, calm and cool and even cold-blooded as he may seem, which saves him entirely from this fault. He may have been possessed by the personage to whom, according to Butler, he even gave a name ; but as Voltaire observed to Mile. Clairon, " C'est le diable au corps qu'il faut avoir," to achieve success in any art. A little more of the same possession would not have done any harm to Guicciardini himself.

No small band of historical followers attend these captains, the chief being perhaps Paolo Giovio (much Miwrhis- better known as Paulus Jovius) 1483-1552, torians. ^ dcxtcrous and successful time-server who wrote chiefly in Latin ; Segni, not the poet {v. supra, p. 39), whose Storie Florentine gave him no small repute for style; and the versatile litt&aten r YsLVchi (1503- 1565), already mentioned, and to reappear, who has less independence and force if not less technical elegance. With these and others — perhaps less their inferiors than they were the inferiors of Guicciardini, or than he was below Machiavelli — Italy started the great vernacular schools of modern history as she had started not a few others. But her own work in the department has hardly contributed, to the epoch-making books of the world, anything save The Prince.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 159

The great tradition of the Italian novella was main- tained during our period. The total number of examples composed during the time must be enor-

7'Ae Novellieri. -, -i i -.i -i-oa li.

mous,and manyare accessible withdiiiiculty. But characteristic examples have been made better known than any other literature of the period, except such triumphs as the Orlando and the Prince, by the combination of intrinsic and accidental attractions in countries other than Italy as well as in Italy itself. For reasons good and bad these novels have always pleased the mere reader, and having been early trans- lated, they exercised upon the literature of other countries, and especially of England, an influence unparalleled by any other except that of the still earlier French romances and fabliaux, from which they were themselves partly derived. The famous Palace of Pleasure of Painter is in very large part a thesaurus of Italian novels, and in a large part a thesaurus of the Italian novelists of this time; nor had France, rich as she was in this kind of litera- ture on her own account, failed to take ample toll from them as they passed over the Alps north- ward.

The most famous novellieri ^ of our time are Bandello, Cinthio, Firenzuola, Grazzini (II Lasca), and Straparola. The collection of the first is the most extensive ; of the second the most artistic and influential on other litera- ture ; those of the third and fourth the best written ;

^ There is a large collection of these in many vols. (Milan, 1813 sq.), and the more celebrated are accessible separately in modern editions. Translations will be noted below.

160 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

and those of the fifth by very far the most interesting and the best in all qualities of literature except pure style.

Matteo Bandello,^ Bishop of Agen (the woes which France inflicted upon Italy at this time were in- adequately alleviated by the ecclesiastical patronage bestowed on Italians at French cost), has pointed many morals at the expense of the Italian clergy of the time (1480-1561). From a sort of defence of his it seems that he was quite aware of them, and as indifferent as Machiavelli undoubtedly would have been, if not actually was, in reference to the sliocks which he gave to morality on another side. Bandello's object was to amuse; fashionable amuse- ment in this particular kind included a great deal of indeceucy and not a little cruelty ; so in his more than two hundred novels he dealt out a liberal measure of both. I do not pretend to have read the whole or even a very large part of them ; but those with which I am acquainted, and which include all those most generally cited and specially praised, seem to me to be singularly destitute of the charms of the kind, and singularly full of its drawbacks. The chief exception is tlie story of Gerardo and Elena : their secret marriage, the attempt of her family to compel her to marry some one else, her apparent death, and her recovery by Gerardo, in

^ Bandello's novels, api>earing in batches from 1554, were trans- lated into French by Boaistuau (1559) and Belleforest (1565). Painter took, through these, much of The Palace of Pleasure, while Fenton followed with more in 1567. There is a selection by Mr Percy Pinker- ton (London, 1895).

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 161

circumstances not wholly unlike "Eomeo and Juliet,"^ with a happy ending. This is really romantic and really agreeable. But the story of Violante, who tortures and butchers her faithless husband with scissors and knives, is merely revolting, without a particle of tragic interest. And the obstinacy of Ginevra in her cruelty to Don Diego is only more satisfactorily treated than the idiotic unkindness to their lovers of the heroines of Spanish romance, because Ginevra is brought to her senses by well- deserved brutality. To read Bandello between his model Boccaccio and his successor Straparola is to form an extremely low opinion of him as a tale-teller.

Bandello, in his quality of unabashed and unmiti- gated amuseur, had not troubled himself with the usual framework story of stories. Cinthio Giraldi

Cinthio.

(1504 - 1573) (himself a critic, v. infra, p. 389, but not to be confounded with the critic Lilius Giraldus) was more orthodox, and adapted his famous Hecatommithi ^ to the sack of Eome and the escape of certain persons therefrom. Although his novels are often yoked with Bandello's as an example of the licence of the time and kind, this is rather unjust, for Cinthio at least intended to be very particular in this respect, though his efforts may appear to modern readers not to have met with that success which the

^ Bandello, the reader may be reminded, also tells this, though Luigi da Porto had been before him in 1531.

^ Some in Painter, and tliose concerning Shakespeare in the different editions of " Shakespeare's Library," &c.

L

162 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

goodness of the intention deserved. On the other hand, the author of the Orbecche (see chap, vi., infra) could not and did not abstain from introducing sub- jects of gloom and horror. It is not insignificant that Shakespeare owed him Othello^ nor that he has trans- formed into a novel-subject the historical or legendary incidents which make the house of Borgia a modern parallel to the houses of Laius and Atreus.

The elegant Firenzuola showed his elegance in his stories, of which, however, he made no formal col- Firemuoiaand Icctiou of any great size; and for the work Grazzini. ^f Doui and others we must refer to Mr Symonds for a short account, or the native historians for a longer. " II Lasca," Grazzini, is of greater im- portance, and his stories, entitled Le Cene, are singu- larly well written and gracefully framed, as well as told with that sense of dramatic and fictitious propor- tion which distinguishes this author. But they have usually borne the dishonourable palm among all the novels of the day for that combination of indecency and cruelty which is the most odious temper of the human soul, and which is far too much in evidence throughout the work of the kind and time.

By far the most interesting to literature of the whole crew (though he is said by Italian purists to be quite the worst for style) is the almost unknown Giovanfrancesco Straparola, who was born at Caravaggio somewhere towards the end of the fifteenth century, wrote some poetry, and also, early in the sixteenth, accomplished a collection of Novelle called Fiacevole Notti, which in part or in

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO, 163

whole were printed seven times in as many years at Venice, between 1550 and 1557, and constantly re- printed afterwards.^ It is not at all correct to say, as has been said, that Straparola owes his charm to " oddity and licence " ; and, though less incorrect, nearly as insufficient to assign his interest to " folk- lore," as is now almost universal. The literary value of Straparola is due to the simple fact that, whether he wrote an Italian style admirable to the authors of composition-books or not, whether he got his materials from other writers, from popular traditions, from sailors landing on the Venetian quays, or from any thing or person else, he managed to make real literature. The punctilious moralist will of course be justly shocked at him for the licence of some of his tales. But his naughtiness is neither cold-blooded nor cruel, and there is an extraordinary charm about some of his stories. The most romantically tragical of all is the death of the girl Malgherita, drowned through the cruel wiles of her brothers, who show false lights as she swims to her love. But this is only one of the " strange and high " excellences of this singular collection. It has a beauty and poignancy of feeling, a suitableness of setting and scenery, which are unmatched in the whole range of the Italian novella, and present the highest possible combination of mediaeval and Renais- sance gift. For what we may call the amiable fairy -

^ The early Italian editions are, however, rare, and the later are said to be garbled. The early French version, by the dramatist Larivey, was reprinted in the BiUiotheque Elzeviricnne. There is an admirable English version by W. G. Waters, 2 vols., London, 1894.

164 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

story> the extravagant fancy of the East, refined to imagination by the Western spirit, there is nothing better anywhere than the story of Biancabella ; for the grim-grotesque variety of the same, than the story of the foolish youth wlio sought for Death and found Life, but in no charming guise. The fantastic legend of the speaking satyr is a vast improvement on the old story (as old as the originals of the Seven Sages) of the wicked queen who had for her attendants men masquerading as girls. But if any one wants to differ- entiate Straparola to his advantage in respect of the worst vice of the novella, he cannot do better than read the story of Quinquino the sculptor, and his true wife Prudence, and the priest Tiberio. This is very familiar in earlier tale -work from the fahliatix on- wards, and there it always ends in " atrocity." Here there is nothing revolting except to prudishness rather than Prudence ; the fun is good throughout ; and the poetic justice not less thoroughly, though less sanguin- arily, complete than in the older versions. It ought to be said that Bembo figures in these stories, and that " M. Peter," as Hoby calls him, talks in a manner much more fitting some of his extant works than the beauti- ful moonshine of his concluding rhapsody in the Corte- giano (v. infra, p. 170). It is good to leave the subject of the novella with these really Pleasing Nights. They are not immaculate — very far from it. But they have colour, fancy, variety, good -humour, passion; they pander to no tendency of humanity that is, per se and hopelessly, bad and detestable. They do not indeed close the record (for the Fentamerone is more than a century

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 165

their junior), but they virtually close the list of the great original novellieri who, though they may have a certain indebtedness to predecessors, do not deliberately compile or refashion from the printed book. Even if Straparola did not invent Fuss in (or rather withmii) Boots, he introduced that gracious animal to literature : and he could deal, as we have seen, with things even more gracious if less merry than Puss.

Amongst the miscellaneous prose of the time it is perhaps less useful to attempt to specify kinds than to „. „ indicate remarkable books. The Letter

Miscellaneous

prose : Letters, and the Dialogue, however, have a certain m ogues. ^laim to mention under the first head. The importance of the Latin Letters of the period (v. supra, p. 101) is almost matched by that of the Italian ; and there are few of the great men of letters of the Penin- sula by whom we have not more or fewer, from Machi- avelli and Guicciardini to Bembo and Caro. These two kinds, indeed, joined to build the sinister fame — infamous rather to himself and his generation — of Pietro Aretino (1492-1557), the " scourge of princes," the "divine" cynosure of real or affected admiration, the pattern of despairing imitators — amongst literary bravos and gentlemen of the gutter press — from his own day to this. In comedy this person undoubtedly deserves serious attention, though his qualities are much the same there as elsewhere. Off the stage his most notorious productions are scarcely mentionable here, while the abundant works of piety with which he inter- spersed libel, flattery, and pornography sheer and mere, require no notice. His Letters extend to six volumes.

166 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

The most literary aspect of Aretino (still excepting his dramatic work) consists, first in the curious differ- ences of opinion which have been held as to his value by critics, who are pretty well agreed as to his moral flagitiousness ; and secondly, in the puzzle which most people have found in the pros- perity and popularity of such a writer. As to the first point, it is perhaps sufficient to observe that no non-dramatic work of Aretino's has ever excited interest apart from some more or less illegitimate attraction of subject — licence, libel, or mere personal gossip. As to the second, there is no real puzzle. Aretino, from a safe retreat in Venice, managed to carry on with impunity a literary business which, in the circumstances of the time, was exactly equivalent to that of the more un- scrupulous modern journalist. It has been observed, with perfect justice, that a personage of this kind " can make almost any man's life a burden to him," and it was exactly on this principle that Aretino worked and blackmailed. What is rather surprising is that the stiletto did not avenge the crimes of the stylus. Attempts at this kind of wild justice were by no means wanting ; but Aretino had the luck of his vileness in escaping them with only minor damage.

The famous autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini ^ has always, and the Lives of the Painters ^ by Giorgio Vasari have sometimes, found place even in brief notices

^ Constantly reprinted. Mr Symonds' translation (2 vols., London, 1888) is one of the best translations in any language, whether we agree or not with his estimate of book and man.

^ The best modern edition is in 9 vols, 1878-85. The translation in Bohn's Library, recently re-edited, is well spoken of for its notes.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 167

of Italian Literature. Vasari, however, though in- finitely important and interesting to the History of Art, and indeed to the general reader, is chiefly recom- mended by his matter — though his form is not disagree- able— and a very copious collection of "Ana." Cellini's book is a book. The great sculptor and goldsmith, though not such a poisonous creature as Aretino, and altogether of a more human, or merely brutal, as opposed to diabolical, complexion, was nearly as much of a bravo as the " Divine " one himself. And it would be exceedingly rash to accept a single statement of his, about himself especially, without full external corroboration. But the verve of the book is extra- ordinary, and its side-lights on history, whether we regard them as really illuminative or mostly Will-o'- the-wispish, are most fascinating. It is possible, how- ever, to exaggerate its strictly literary merit. Cellini's most competent translator and most uncompromising admirer has described it as "heedless animated talking." Now the simulation of this is literature, the mere utter- ance is not. Miss Austen was certainly a literary genius ; Miss Bates less certainly.

The very curious Dialogues and Bagionamenti of Gianbattista Gellii (1493-1563) will be best noticed Miscellanies of in conncction with his comedies. But some ^ia%emZ^^^ uoticc may here be taken of representatives varcM, Caro. of a curious class of work in which the sensuality and the philosophy of the Italians were helped, by the mastery of the language now attained,

^ With the plays in Sonzogno's collection, Milan, 1887. Qelli, who was a hosier, also lectured on the Divina Commedia,

168 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

to express themselves, alwa^ with great ingenuity and sometimes with no inconsiderable charm. Firenzuola (v. supra, p. 152) puts all his lore and not a little (in not quite so innocent a sense) of that other matter which ancient Gower has coupled with lore at the beginning of the Confessio Amantis, into his discourse

• Delia Bellezza delle Donne — a fruitful theme on which less elegant writers also expatiated. The great Bembo (who, besides many letters and other works, conde- scended to a formal grammatical treatise Delia Volgar

^^lAihgua) put the considerable elegance and the not inconsiderable strength which he possessed into the Ciceronian but vernacular disquisitions on the subject of Love entitled Gli Asolani} Benedetto Varchi's Ercolano^ is, again, devoted to and written in the vulgar tongue, but composed in the manner of Cicero, while his Lezioni sop^a Alcune Qwistioni d'Amore form yet another of the documents which might justify against the Italians of the time the application of Macaulay's harsh antiphrasis on Southey's heroes, that they " make love like seraphim — or like cattle." And the work of that excellent if hardly important writer Annibal Caro,^ includes experiments in almost every kind of prose. But before concluding the chapter we must give somewhat fuller attention to one famous book referred to often already.

Mention has already been made of Baldassare Cas-

1 Both these, with Letters, &c., in the same collection, Milan, 1880. ' Both in one volume of the same, ibid., 1888.

• See 2 vols, of the same, Lettere Familiari, ibid., 1879, and Apolo-

gia, kc, ibid., 1884.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 169

tiglione as not the least attractive of the Latin-Italian castigiioneand poets of our period. He wrote Italian as The Courtier, ^gjj g^g L^tin poetry, and was a diplomatist of some importance in his day. But for none of these things can he be said to have any real share in the general European memory, though undoubtedly he has such a share. His title is the famous Gortegiano, which was printed in 1528, but had been written some twelve years earlier, which spread itself rapidly over Europe, reaching England (under the care of Sir Thomas Hobyi) in 1561, and which has been selected and praised by good wits as a sort of Bible of the Eenais- sance — a summary of its creed as to almost all things noble and of good report.

That the book is itself a noble one there need not be the least hesitation in granting; and, for once, there seems to be little if any doubt that the preacher recked his own rede. None of the distinguished Italians of the time has a less questionable record than Castiglione. His book is not in the least exposed to the imputation sometimes made against it, of being a mere manual of etiquette, a successor of the " Babee's Books " of the Middle Ages, and a predecessor of the more trivial part of Chesterfield's Letters. The Oalateo of La Casa, which came a little later, is obnoxious to this cliarge ; the Coicrtier is not. Nor, further, can it be denied that the tone of the book represents an ideal which the Eenaissance saw afar off and approved of too often platonically, or after the Ovidian fashion rather.

^ Hoby's Courtier has been excellently edited by Professor Raleigh in the "Tudor Translations," London, 1900.

170 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

The scheme of it is but a variation on that which the genius of Boccaccio, if it had not exactly invented, had made canonical in Italy for a very large part of lighter and even of graver literary work — the scheme of conversation between a party of noble, or gentle, or learned men and women. The scene is the Court of Urbino, where Castiglione actually abode for a con- siderable time, and the central figure — not speaking much, but addressed by all and guiding everything — is its Duchess, whom, from the unmistakable sincerity of his lament over her death in the later-written Intro- duction, the author would seem to have regarded with no small share of the fantastic but generous adoration which he inculcates in his book. The subject is suffi- ciently close to the title on the whole — dealing with the qualities and qualifications of courtiers of both sexes. But the author permits himself considerable expatiations, though he usually brings them round to the point. Thus the Second Book is mainly occupied with jests of one kind or another, sometimes not too strait-laced, though never outstepping the decency which is the note of the whole book. A great deal of space, too, is occupied by a repetition or variation of the old slanders on women by some of the characters, and a long and vigorous defence of them by Frederico Tregoso and Giuliano de' Medici. In the earlier part there are some remarks on the vexed question of Tus- canism, which played only too large a part in Italian Criticism, and the whole piece ends by a discourse on love, in the highest Platonic altitudes, by no less a person than Pietro Bembo. On the whole, no one can

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO 171

deny that Castiglione does his best to outline the " very perfect gentle knight " of his own times in a spirit at once of delicate accomplishment, of manly proficiency in sport and war, and of high ethical and intellectual, though scarcely religious, sentiment. It is almost enough to say that there is no man of the century who fulfils the ideal of The Courtier so well as Sir Philip Sidney, and that there is not the slightest reason for doubting that Sidney himself had The Courtier and its ideal constantly before him.

This is very high praise, and it may be supple- mented and enlarn ;d for English readers. Very much of the best distinctive character of our Elizabethan period generally, from its earlier, more homely, and more prosaic foreshadowings in Ascham to its perfect flower of poetry and philosophy in Spenser, is closely connected with Castiglione's temper and teachings. Whatsoever evil the " Italianation " of Englishmen may have done must be regarded as compensated hand- somely by the holding up of this pattern, which, by the way (we may something pride ourselves upon the fact), was nowhere welcomed and developed to sucli an extent as with us. Germany was too coarse and too distracted ; France, though there is more than a touch of The Courtier in the exquisite passage — satire softening at the thing satirised — on the Court of Quintessence in Eabelais, was too confused and too careless of morality to serve as good culture for this germ. In Spain, indeed, it found a not uncongenial home : Don Quixote is a spiritual son of Castiglione, who, by the way, seems to have had not a little of

172 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

the Don's guilelessness as well as of his chivalry, and was admired and cheated by Charles V. on Spanish ground itself. But England alone received the seed in a thoroughly kindly soil, and brought the flower and fruit to perfection. All the gentler and nobler side of the great Elizabethan heroes reflects The Courtier within its own century, and after half another had nearly passed, the typical Cavalier is the Courtier him- self, ennobled and strengthened a little, that he may " keep the bird in his bosom " against a worsening world, and die with it still there. Nay, Milton on the other side, though of temper in part opposed to the ideal, still has much of it.

But in speaking of a book which is so famous, and has been so much and to a great extent so justly praised, it is necessary also to give the other side. That the atmosphere of The Courtier is extremely artificial — that it is hardly adapted for any but a very small section of the human race in a somewhat accidental condition of society, possessing a very large number of comparatively small courts, at which most of the men of birth or sons of learning congregate — is no fatal objection. The conditions, though complicated and artificial, were real for a considerable time, and in more than one country, and might very conceivably become real again ; while it would not be destructive to the book if they were as fantastic as those of Brobding- nag or Utopia. A much more serious objection is the singular, or rather, in the Italian Kenaissance, not singular but ordinary, limitation of the ethical element, and the almost entire elimination of the religious.

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 173

The Elizabethans, as we have seen, supplied the gaps, and thus made the ideal both a nobler and a more practical one. But the actual Courtier, however accomplished as a courtier, is distinctly rudimentary as a man. He is to have justice, wisdom, temperance, and so forth, just as he is to be good at the jereed and in the tiltyard, and to speak French and Spanish. But Sidney's action with the water n'est pas dans son rollet. And the devotion which is as ardent and as sincere in the Faerie Queene as in the Lancelot, sends neither glance nor glow through any page of the volume, unless somebody good-naturedly discovers it in Bembo's Platonic raptures.

The last name, too, brings us to another head of the Devil's Advocate's brief. We have no reason, as has been said, to question Castiglione's own character; and if his time simply had not lived up to the shining pattern he put before it, it would not be the only time which has " sinned its mercies " in such a kind. But the contrast of the book and the time is almost too glaring. In the book itself the highest praise is given to Ippolito of Este, a worse than fratricide from the point of view of morality, and from the point of view of taste the author (in some form or other to all but certainty) of the description of the greatest poem of the time, and one of the greatest poems of the world, as a " pack of rubbish." When Aretino and Machia- velli write they may shock us or not, but they are certainly expressing the spirit of their age and country. When Castiglione writes he may have ex- pressed a spirit which animated himself, and Michel-

174 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

angelo, and Vittoria Colonna, and a few more elect souls, but which certainly animated few others. There is hardly in all literature a passage of bitterer irony than the enthusiastic anticipations of what Henry VIIL, Francis I., and Charles V. are to be and to do, when we remember what each one of the three actually was, actually did. Indeed from a certain point of view The Courtier is the counterpart and the explanation of The Prince. When goodness was so limited and so unpractical, practicalness must almost be excused for being so unlimitedly bad.

Of few periods of far fewer literary histories is it more difficult to speak in brief space than of the sub- ject of the present chapter. The " Age of Leo X.," as it used to be loosely called, was for no small length of time, and under no few changes of prevailing literary taste, extolled as one of the greatest ages of literature, as perhaps the greatest age of modern literature. It fell from this high estate about a century ago, and though strong efforts have been made in its favour during the past half century, it is perhaps never likely to recover its old pride of place. Of the greatness of its best authors, of an Ariosto or a Machiavelli, there never has been much, and there never should be any, doubt. By the number of names which it has to show in a rank somewhat lower it may match all but the best of other times in other countries. In polish and accomplishment of language, in clear knowledge on the part of the writers of exactly what they wanted to do, and exactly the means which would make most readers think that they had done this, it has perhaps no superior

THE ZENITH OF THE CINQUECENTO. 175

at all. But the rift within its lute has undoubtedly widened with time, and that not only from one critical point of view nor according to the shibboleth of one critical sect. From one point too much of its poetry is deficient in " cry," too much of its prose deficient in rhythmical magnificence or in racy vigour of style. From another the verse sufTers equally from the occa- sional emptiness and the occasional frigidity of its sentiment, the prose either from its tendency to a one- sided criticism of life, whether the side be that of Castiglione or that of Machiavelli, or from an absence of any such criticism, as in the more formal and rhetorical writings of Bembo and the rest. Yet, as we shall hope to show in the Conclusion, this is but Italy's part of the burden of the Eenaissance. And while acknowledging it, let us remember the charm of Ariosto, the force of Machiavelli, the real thrill and actual " cry " of Michelangelo and La Casa, the stately chivalry of Castiglione — nay, even the varied pastime of many of the novels and the wicked wit of some of the burlesques.^

• Many other writers might of course have been mentioned. Per-

haps the most missed will be Ortensio Landi (1501-1560), of the Paradossi (1543) and other ingenious works, exhibiting, with perhaps a little quackery and faufaronnade, a good deal of real talent. The mixture has not been unknown at other periods. My friend Mr Axon of Manchester has written some interesting papers on Landi.

176

CHAPTER III.

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD.

SOME BACKWARDNESS IN THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE — THE " RH^TORI- QUEUr" school — THE ARTIFICIAL FORMS OP POETRY — THE ITALIAN INFLUENCE — SUB-PERIODS — MINOR WRITERS OF THE EARLY SIX- TEENTH CENTURY — COLL^RYE, BOUCHET, JEHAN DU PONTALAIS — CLI5mENT MAROT — HIS LIFE — CHARACTER AND IMPORTANCE OF HIS POETRY — THE ' PSALMS ' AND OTHER WORK — RABELAIS — THE PROB- LEM OF HIM — HIS LIFE— ' GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL ' — THEIR GENERAL FORM AND SCHEME — FANTASTIC NOTIONS ON THE SUBJECT — REALLY A SATIRICAL CRITICISM OF LIFE — COMPARATIVE QUALITY OF THE SATIRE — THE STYLE — SHORT RUNNING COMMENTARY — GENERAL REMARKS — CALVIN — VALUE OP THE 'INSTITUTION' IN STYLE — MINORITIES OP THE MID-CENTURY — MARGUERITE DE VALOIS — THE ' HEPTAMERON ' — BONAVENTUBE DES PERIERS — THE ' NOD-

VELLES Recreations' — the 'cymbalum mundi ' — mellin db

SAINT-GELAIS — MAGNY, TAHUREAU, LOUISE LAB]6.

In passing from Italy to France we pass, once for all, from the mistress to the scholars ; and we enter on the subject-matter strictly indicated by the title of our volume, as far as the vernaculars are concerned. The first half of the sixteenth century, we have freely admitted, is not the period of the Early Eenaissance in Italy ; there is no reasonable doubt or controversy that it is the period of the Early Eenaissance in France.

FROM EHETORIC TO PLEIAD 177

It is rather remarkable that tlie Humanism which

ushered the vernacular Eenaissance in all countries

Some hack- sliould havc been less noticeable and later

wardnessin j^ Francc than anywhere else. The fact is

the French •'

Renaissance, not doubtf ul ; the studj of Greek — the Humanist sine qua non — was, by all trustworthy wit- ness, much later than in Italy, later even than in Ger- many and in England. But this fact is susceptible, if not of explanation, of a certain amount of illustrative comment. France has seldom been very remarkable for classical — at least for Greek — studies, and though she certainly became so for a time during our present period, this was long the only exception. In the second place, the French universities were particularly powerful and particularly obscurantist. Scarcely even in Spain was there a more persecuting body, when persecution came into fashion, than the Sorbonne; scarcely at Cologne under the greatest flourishing of Ortuinus was there, to say the least, a greater re- sistance of inertia to the new studies than at Paris. And, still further, something must be set down to the fact that France had not only the oldest and most celebrated university teaching in Europe, but also a literature which, though Italy could outshine it with her best examples and with the state of perfection reached by them, was far older, immensely more voluminous, and more varied than the Italian. Yet of this literature, as the conquered Italians notice with some contempt, the French nobility and gentry of the fifteenth century took very little heed; while it further happened that French had for some time fallen

M

178 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

into grooves of both verse and prose, which were likely to hold the wheels steadily.

These grooves are those of what, with more con- venience and logical reason than positive historical The Rh^tori- authority, is called the " Ehetoriqueur " queur »c;ioof. gchool.^ The term is derived from a chance gibe of the late fifteeenth- century poet and satirist Coquillart at the versifiers his contemporaries as grands rhdtoriqueurs ; and the justification of it as denoting not merely the style but the literature of a whole period is strong. Not merely had Khetoric in France and all over Europe, as it were, subsumed poetry, but the very word had begun to be used as equivalent to poetry itself. The praise of Chaucer's "Ehetoric" is familiar in English work of the time, and the habit was at least as common across the Channel as this side of it.

Now the association of Rhetoric with exceedingly ornate (" aureate," as it was called in English) language was an old one enough ; in fact it had become and had remained inveterate in ordinary speech, while it was sanctioned, if not by the great old authorities such as Aristotle (which were only now again going to be known directly), by those with which the Middle Ages were most familiar, such as Martianus Capella. That barbaric but not despicable writer's description of Rhetoric herself — with her bright col- oured dress, her gemmed and various-figured baldric, her rattling and clattering armour, the resounding of her very kisses — was thoroughly adopted and enjoyed.

^ See The Transition Period, p. 114.

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 179

And it has perhaps never been more thoroughly carried out in prose or in verse than by the French writers from Christine de Pisan and Alain Chartier to Cretin and Le Maire de Beiges, and by the Burgundian school, such as Chastelain and Robertet. But for these reference may be made to the preceding volume of this History.

It happened further that the tendency was intensified

by the equally inveterate popularity of the artificial

__ ..^ . , forms of verse — Ballades, rondeaux, chants

The artificial ' '

fortnsof royaux, and the rest — which had come into ^* ^' favour at a rather uncertain period in the

late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, and had held it with singular tenacity, and with the redoubling of technical refinements usual in such cases. These forms, in the hands of the best of their earlier practitioners, such as Jehannot de Lescurel, had shown themselves able to embody, in a very charming and adequate fashion, the fresh gaiety and genuine sentiment of the Middle Ages; while in at least two writers of the mid-fifteenth century, Charles d'Orleans, and still more Villon, they had served as vehicles to poetry of the truest, and in the latter case all but the most universal, character. But they were now very old and very much hackneyed — the bloom was off and the juice out of them ; while, unfortunately, their very formal perfection, and the almost automatic music with which it provided those who used them, made it specially easy to obtain the semblance of poetry without the reality.

If this applied to verse, prose suffered not only from

180 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

Rhetoric, but from a complication of minor drawbacks and deficiencies. A new kind, of immense promise, either in the hands of Antoine de La Salle or in those of somebody else, had indeed been founded by the transformation of the old verse fahliau into the new prose tale ; but it is probable that this itself owed a good deal to Italian influence. The vernacular Ser- mon had advanced in familiarity and liveliness, if not exactly in dignity. But the Chronicle, which had always absorbed the chief energies of French prose-writers, was specially infested by Rhetoric ; and in its one great practitioner, Comines (who continues over not a little of our own period, though he is more representa- tive of the last), it had a man whose genius was very much more of thought and matter than of style, who had a great deal to teach thoughtful French readers, but very little to set before ambitious and docile French writers by way of pattern. All this made at once for some delay in the reception of a foreign influ- ence, and for a powerful effect of it when it once began to work.

The actual beginning certainly coincides more or less with the Italian wars of Charles VIII. and his The Italian succcssors. This Coincidence is indeed so influeTice. natural and so certain that there is no need to haggle over any difficulties of date or detail. These French invasions coincided with the very flower- and fruit-time of the Italian literature of the Renais- sance, and there could be no question of the literary faculty of the race which was brought into contact therewith. Yet the effect (for the reasons doubtless

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 181

which have been given) was by no means shown very early. The first French sonnets, those of Mellin de Saint-Gelais, only date from c. 1530 ; the Italian in- fluence, though it exists, is by no means very strong, in Marot, whose forms are chiefly of an older kind ; and though Italian as well as French romances may have had their influence on Rabelais, the Italian work which aff'ected him most was the Harlequin-Latin Macaronic of Folengo. Not till quite towards the end of our time, and in that work of the PUiade with which we do not directly meddle,^ is the Italian influence triumphant or full.

The literary interest of our own time, therefore, may

be divided into three parts. First, the earlier and older

fashioned work which is specially repre-

Suh-'peTiods. • i- i r.

sentative or the first quarter or the century ; then that of two or three writers of the transition (one at least also one of the principal writers of Europe) ; and last, that of writers such as those just men- tioned, Mellin de Saint-Gelais and others, who touch " Rhetoric " with one hand and the PUiade with the other, who are mainly contemporary with Marot, and would have been so longer, had not that luckless, though not graceless, bard's life been cut so short.

For the first batch, however, we need spare no very

extensive space here : its most important representa-

, tives indeed have already been dealt with

Minor icnters of ^ _ " ^

iheeariysix- in the preceding volume. Comines, as

century, j^^^ ^^^^ QQ\^^ livcd into our period, indeed,

outlived its first decade ; the poet-chronicler Molinet —

^ For it see the vol. ou The Later Jtenaisscmce.

182 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

heavy as poet, heavier as chronicler — saw its first seven years. Tlie life of Guillaume Cretin covered the first quarter of the century, so that Rabelais could represent his death-bed without violence to possible chronology, and in a spirit which is not so certainly scoffing as some have thought.

Although Master Francis also borrows Geoffroy Tory's mocking at the extreme rhetoriqueurs in the matter of the Limousin student, Tory (1480 ?-1533) was more classical than Italian in his tastes, and would probably have regarded sonnets and rondeaux in the mood of " fight dog, fight bear." The shrewd and clear-headed (nor thick-voiced) Coquillart himself did not die till 1510, and the great lights of the later Mediaeval theatre, the brothers Greban, had scarcely gone out. But the chief poets of the time (for Octavien de Saint-Gelais but just outstepped the limit of 1500) were Jean Marot (the certain, as Octavien was the probable, father of a poet greater than him- self), the agreeable light singer, lioger de Collerye, and Jean Le Maire de Beiges, who, though a long liver, was distinctly of the earlier school, and has from some received the credit of being by far its best writer. If we add the shadowy Jehan du Pontalais, and the laborious Bouchet, a still longer-lived man than Le Maire de Beiges, the utmost demands of proportional representation for the period will be satisfied.^

^ It is unpleasant to have to find fault with predecessors. But it is necessary to say that the great collaborative History of M. Petit de Julleville gives a treatment of the minor French writers of the pres- ent period which is inadequate and perfunctory to an astonishing degree, when it is remembered that the book extends to eight very

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 183

Coll^rye, Bouchet, and Pontalais may have a little longer notice. Eoger de Collerye, an Auxerrois, and coiurye, a Writer of verse much ligliter than any- M^ndu thing of the time before Marot, is not only Pontalais. commcndably free from the worst vices of the style of the RMtoriqueurs, but occupies a place of some importance as the first named modern repre- sentative of the famous French school of joyous song. He keeps the allegorical personage to some extent, but avoids its atmosphere of tedium, though he is a little conventional. There could not be a greater contrast to him, save in this one point, than Jehan Bouchet, " Traverseur de Yoies P(5rilleuses," friend of Rabelais (who did not dislike his verse) and author of an enormous amount of rh^toriqueur poetry. Jehan du Pontalais, on the other hand, is a contrast, partly in the same, partly in a different way, to the solid Bouchet himself. For he is only personally known as a sort of minor Villon, or French George Peele — the Peele of the Jests, not the Plays. But there has been attributed to him a really remarkable anonymous book of Louis XII.'s time, Les Contredits du Songecreux, partly farce, partly direct satire on classes, if not (which was as yet too dangerous) on

large volumes for French Literature only. Fortunately nothing can be better than the treatments in MM. Hatzfeld and Darmesteter's Seizieme Siicle en France (Paris, 1878), and in the first volume of Crdpet's Poetes Franqais (Paris, 1861), where the subject was mainly in the most competent hands of M. Ch. d'H^ricault. In these the necessary amplifications of the text must be sought. Modern edi- tions of Coll^rj^e, Bouchet, and one or two other writers exist ; but most are only in the older forms.

184 EUKOPEAN LITERATUEE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

individuals. But these and others must be sought in special histories ; even far-fetched and dear-bought old acquaintance must not obtain for them more than a representative position here. It is sufficient that in this twilight of modern French they illustrate already tendencies which have been more fully de- veloped since. The special and peculiar glory of the language, the polishing of the plain style till it has the supremacy of Pascal or Male^ranche, of Courier or Mdrira^e, they indeed show not. But the light gaidois manner, which has of late almost disappeared in anything like perfection, is very fairly in evidence ; and even the ampullm of the Bh4toriqueurs may be charitably regarded as attempts at that grandeur which, though far less characteristic of the literature, was attained later in this century by Dubartas and Aubigne, and three hundred years afterwards by Lamennais and Hugo.

In all these writers the late mediaeval character

is still uppermost, and it has hardly lost its place in

Clement Marot. His father Jean, a Nor-

Climent Marot. i i • i i i

man by birth, had moved southward and married a Cahorsine girl, or rather two in succession. The second (her name is unknown) was the mother of Clement, who was born in the winter of 1496-97. Jean, who was secretary or scribe to Anne of Brittany, was himself a versifier of merit in the recognised forms, and even something of a poet ; and when he introduced his little son to the court of France at the age of ten years only, both he himself and divers of the lettered court of Louis XIT. taught the boy rhyming

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD 185

in fashions which, like some, though not all good men of the time, he did not forget or rebel against. Clement was busy at first with tlie usual fifteenth- century things, "Judgments" of this, "Temples" of that, exactly as if he had been a Lydgate earlier, or a Douglas in his own time. He presented a poem to Duke (not yet King) Francis about 1514, that is to say, in or about his own eighteenth year. Five years later he was fadeur, " maker," poet, to Francis' Queen Claude, and gentleman -pensioner of Francis' sister Margaret and her husband the Duke d'Alencjon. To Margaret he was in more senses than one attached for the whole of his life ; and the usual half-natural and half-fatuous pains have been taken to define the exact limits and character of the attachment. That it was something more than that of courtier to queen, or the still lower one of pensioner to patroness, no one who reads his work can have much doubt ; but there is a third relationship, that of professional poet-lover to mistress "in title," which is far more difficult to characterise with any certainty. Some excellent folk have, in this as in other cases, tried to clear Queen Margaret of any scandal. Let us do better : let us not even consider the question.

What is certain is that Margaret was not only his

mistress in the noble senses, but his sincere, and, as

long as it was in her power, his effectual

His life. *= , ., ^ ^ .

protectress ; while Francis seems also to have been as sincere a friend to Marot as his mStier of king, and his temperament of selfish sensualist, permitted. The poet went with him to Italy in 1524,

186 EUEOPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

the year of his pension, was wounded and taken at Pavia : but returned to France next year. There was a " Diana " (possibly but not probably she of Poitiers) who had been kind and now was not. He thought she had something to do with the troubles which soon came on him in the shape of imprisonment for heresy. It is certain that, if Diana was his evil angel, Margaret was liis good one, and obtained his release. He not only escaped this danger in 1526, but soon after became a pensioned servant of the king himself. In 1530 he married.

But his troubles on the score of heresy were not over : in fact they were but beginning. He was called to legal account in 1531, when he escaped by the suretyship of the King and Queen of Navarre, through their secretary, and again in 1535. Then he thought not even Bearn a safe refuge, but escaped to Ferrara, where he had the protection of the duchess, Eende of France, who, like all the Valois princesses, protected letters.

He had three years before collected his earlier work under the title (one of the delightful conceits for naming men and books which redeem the rMtoriqueur school) of Adolescence Clementine, and at Ferrara he wrote Masons and half-nonsense epistles, which had a great vogue. But Renc^e's husband was less well inclined to the Reformation than his wife, and Marot had to leave Ferrara; though after a sojourn in Venice he was permitted to return to France. He was still patronised and favoured by the king. But it is possible that he did himself no good by a quarrel

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 187

(not the least " be - inked " of those tedious things, the " Quarrels of Authors ") with another poet, Francois Sagon ; and certain that he stirred up his old enemies by his translation of the Psalms. So once more he had to fly, this time to Geneva. But, like others, he found the capital of the Reformation as intolerant as any stronghold of the Pope, and infected besides by a fanatic sourness more detestable than any " decretalism." He is said to have been con- demned to death, and actually whipped ; he seems certainly to have been turned out of the city in the most insulting fashion. Francis, however, was still well inclined towards him personally, and lie was allowed to die quietly in Piedmont, under French protection, if not in France. The event occurred in 1544, when the poet had not yet reached the age of fifty. His days had been few ; and many of them, especially the last, when the "browner shades" re- quire most alleviation of circumstance, had been evil. Of the two famous epithets of the poet, Marot cer- tainly deserves that of " light " if not exactly (despite his Psalms) that of "holy." Neither shall the re- proacli of wwholiness be by any means attached to him. His seems to have been altogether a fair- weather nature : entirely free from all the more de- testable vices, but not abundantly furnished with the more stalwart virtues, and very particularly destitute of that — highest of all, or rather transcendent over them all — which is called Wisdom.

Something, though not so much as is generally thought or said, of this levity of character, reflects

188 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

itself iu his poetry.^ With rare exceptions, among ^ , ^ which are some pieces, probably or cer-

Character and ^ ' ^ •'

importance of tainly, to Margaret, his lightest things are ispoery. ^^ ^^^ j^.^ ^^^^^ -g.^ earlier allegorical

poems display almost all the numerous faults which beset their evil kind ; his Psalms excite the merest historic interest ; and his Blasons or elaborate pieces of eulogistic or abusive description share, while they are much less amusing, the tedium which attaches even to a certain part of the grotesque of Eabelais himself. Only, perhaps, in the easy flow of the Epistles to the King, and other similar pieces, do we come upon things in Marot which do not require to be praised by allowance.

Yet, to us at least, he is of all but the first interest. This interest is derived in the first place from the surviving mediaevalism which made him admire and edit not merely Villon but the Romance of the Rose itself, and which is obvious almost throughout his work, side by side with characteristics which are those of the Eenaissance and almost of modernity. In the second place, he is interesting because he carries high the banner which it has been the special boast of literary France to wave — the banner of the lighter as opposed to the graver literature — and be- cause in doing this he has almost entirely shaken off the somewhat elaborate and ponderous jocularity which had become fashionable in the later Middle Ages, and which, though his gigantic strength enables him almost always to avoid heaviness, is by ^ Ed. Jannet and C. d'Hericault, 4 vols. Paris, 1873.

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 189

no means imperceptible in Rabelais. Lastly, he is interesting because he has done some things very delightful in themselves.

It has been said that few modern readers will find

these points of interest in the once famous Psalms.

To estimate the popularity of these we

Tfte Psalms no i ,. , . / •,

must or course allow for the fashion (and something more) which recommended them, but even then it is not quite easy to understand. No verse translations of the Psalms have ever been satisfactory, the best being perhaps that in Northumbrian Middle English. The English Prose Authorised Version is indeed magnificent; but its magnificence arises from the very qualities which French was losing rather than gaining at the hands of Marot himself and his successors. Neatness and grace, though they are well enough at home in some of Marot's shorter religious pieces, the so-called Oraisons, are things useless if not positively dangerous in the rendering of Hebrew poetry. Very rarely will even the subdued but poignant pas-^ sion which he sometimes could command come into play, while splendour, sublimity, colour, indignation, passionate sorrow for sin, are not his trade at all. To take the very beginning —

" Qui au conseil des malings n'a estd, Qui n'est au trac des pecheurs arrest6, Qui des mocqueurs au banc place n'a prise,"

is not very much above

" How blest the man who ne'er consents By ill advice to walk,"

while it is perhaps even more prosaic. Not only does

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Marot scarcely ever achieve that grave melody of which the later Huguenot poets were masters, but he makes little of subjects such as the " King's Daughter," which might have seemed likely to appeal to him. He is perhaps better in the mild and plaintive line, such as Qui Habitat in adjutorio (Ps. xci.) than on the greater occasions of the Co&li Enarrant, or the De Frofundis, or the Super Flumina, though he does no ill justice to this last. His prose, as shown in the prefaces of the Bose, the Villon, and the Adolescence Clementine, is pleas- ant and useful to compare with that of

and other work. ^ , , . „,, i i i • ^

Itabelais. ihere are agreeable things also in many of his Epistles, besides the famous and uni- versally known one to the king about his larcenous valet. But for the real Marot — the poet — we must go to the " little people " of his flock, the epigrams, and the rondeaux, and the songs, to the exquisite

" Un doulx Nenny avec un doulx soubzrire,"

which has been glanced at above as having been thought to be addressed seriously or in character to Margaret, to the famous ballade of Frdre Lubin, to the delightful rondeaux " Dedans Paris " and " En la Bais- ant." Not that these are the only good things of the kind in him, but that they are the best where many are good.

There are few of the greater writers of the world of whom it is more difficult to take a purely achro- matic view than it is to take such a view of Eabelais; and there is perhaps no one in whose case it is so difficult to get that view, when

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 191

once taken, accepted by others. He appeals, indeed, if not quite on the same side, to Frenchmen and Eng- lishmen almost equally, and is in not a few ways even more Teutonic than Latin. But, except the national idola, there is hardly one of the great classes of dis- turbing prepossession which does not here come into play : — the religious, the moral, the aesthetic, others equally or almost equally powerful. Nor is the matter made any better by the fact of the difhculty (or at least apparent difficulty) of his language ; for, small as this difficulty really is, it is great in appearance. As he has been generally praised, the praise has almost always been of that controversial, not to say directly provocative, character which makes two enemies for one friend. The apostle of free-thought and assailant of superstition cannot recommend himself to those The •problem who prize orthodoxy and religion 5 the ad- ofhim. vocate of Humanist apolaustics is horrible to the severe moralist; the amasser of images and ex- pressions which are not only loose but coarse in the extreme must shock the person of refinement. And the worst of it is that Eabelais — very little read, and read not least it may be feared for the least good side of him — is apt to be regarded from one or other of these points of view before he is read at all, and the prepossession hopelessly colours the reading.

Perhaps the fallacy which is at once most necessary and hardest to remove in his case is the almost universal notion — contradicted by every man's know- ledge of himself, but recurring in every man's judg- ment of another — that human nature is consistent ; the

192 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

notion of " ruling passions " of the homogeneous type. This fallacy is apt to pervade attack and defence alike. " No decent man," cries one side, " could pos- sibly use such language or put such ideas," and the other side replies that he used the language and the ideas merely or mainly as a screen or a blind, to make his more serious conceptions agreeable or safe. So with his free-thought ; so with other things. It seems almost impossible to get people to accept the obvious truth that in most cases, if not in all, the strands of life and thought are double ; that there is what we are pleased to call an animal as well as what we are pleased to call a spiritual side in man ; that it is possible — nay, common — to laugh at what you both love and respect. That is to say, though perhaps nobody but a fool would deny these propositions in the abstract assertion, it is the hardest thing to get even wise men to accept them in the concrete applica- tion. A little hypocrisy, a little false modesty, and a great deal of false logic combine to prevent this ac- ceptance. If people would only remember the whole, as some have actually remembered a part, of the fol- lowing simple truths, Eabelais would cease to be either a horror or a puzzle. These truths (as one may hope they be) are : That Rabelais was a man of the sixteenth century, with the semi -rational admiration for anti- quity and the semi-irrational contempt of the Middle Ages, which belonged to the men of his time, intensified by genius and only partly corrected by humour : That he was an escaped monk : That the association of light literature and loose language is a very old thing, and

FROM RHETOEIC TO PLEIAD. 193

in fact has but recently ceased to be the order of every literary day: That the light literature of France in fabliau and farce had been as exceptionally coarse as her serious poetry and romance had been exceptionally chaste: That the kind of thQ fatra^ie, or miscellany of sense and nonsense, was established and popular : That Eabelais was (and no shame to him) sincerely fond of the good gifts of God — the beauty of woman and of art and of literature, the gladness of the wine, the pleasant savour of flesh and fish and fowl and fruit : That he was an equally sincere devotee of religion as he under- stood it, and that if there was too much revolt from the mediaeval view in his understanding, there was good sense too — sense of the welfare of mankind, of the establishment of a noble theory and practice of living : That he shared not ungenerously in the hopes (let us be frank and say the delusions) of perfectibility, which were common in his time. And lastly (for we must allow for this, though not quite to the same extent as some of his maladroit defenders have allowed) : That he was a man of extraordinary shrewdness, who had run great risks already and was not too anxious to run more, and that his time was an exceedingly dangerous time. If spring and escapement be adjusted with a due heed to these facts, there will not be so much difficulty, as there has generally been assumed, in the way of " knowing our Eabelais." ^

^ The minor genuine or probably genuine works of Rabelais are in- considerable. They consist of a burlesque or " Pantagrueline " Pro- gnostication, which has been frequently imitated, and is not itself quite original, but amusing and characteristic enough ; of La Sciomachie, a description of the festivities at Rome in the palace of the Cardinal

N

194 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

Francois Rabelais — " Maitre Alcofribas Nasier " by one of the anagrams dear to his day — " Caloyer des lies Hyeres," by another fantastic alias — was born at Chinon, probably about 1495. A much earlier date, 1483, used to be assigned. He was sent "into religion" at the early age which equally excluded all possibility of real vocation, and all opportunity of resisting if there was none; and it was particularly unfortunate that his order was that of St Francis, which had sunk to the extremity

Ambassador du Bellay on the occasion of tlie birth of the Duke of Orleans ; of a verse-letter to the " Traverseur de Voies Perilleuses " (v. supra) ; and of a few epistles, some in French, some in Latin, There is no reasonable doubt about any one of these. Of the Apocrypha the most important is a curious collection of fantastic woodcuts entitled Sondes Drolatiqucs de I'antagrud, which have the extravagance and the obscenity of the more questionable parts of " the Book," but necessarily want its higher qualities, and indeed are little more than caricature-puzzles of a low type. The bibliography of the earlier editions of Gargantua, &c., is a complicated subject; and the variations during the lifetime of the author were considerable. In the almost endless task of annotation that of Le Duchat (Amster- dam, 1711) was the pioneer, and is still to some extent a source. Of later editions that of Esmangart and Johauueau (Paris, 1823-26), which includes the Songes Drolatiques, is still more or less indispensable for the thorough student. But the two most generally recommendable of the text are those of Jannet and Moland in seven pocket volumes, which has the more certain minor works, and a useful glossary (2d ed., Paris, 1873), and the more stately one of Marty-Laveaux (1870 on- wards). The English translation of Sir Thomas Urquhart is almost a classic in itself, and it was not ill-continued by Motteux. It has been more than once handsomely reprinted recently ; while in 1893 Mr \V. F. Smith of St John's College, Cambridge, gave a new English version with commentary representing recent French study. The literature of articles, &c., on Rabelais is enormous ; that of entire books not small. The best of the latter are those of M. Jules Fleury in French and Sir Walter Besant in English.

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 195

of uncouthness and corruption. He took priest's orders ; but was ill at ease himself and unpopular with his brethren. Nor was he, the most unmonkish of mankind, much better satisfied with the Benedic- tines (the most scholarly and polished of orders, as the Cordeliers were the most ignorant and clownish), to whom he was transferred by the Pope's licence. He unfrocked himself with the connivance of the Bishop of Maillezais, studied medicine and practised it, besides acting as printer's reader, and thus using as well as acquiring his considerable classical scholarship. He had a still more powerful protector in Cardinal du Bellay, in whose suite he went to Kome, and who, when the tolerance of Francis the First changed to intolerance, restored him for a time to convent life. But the king was always personally well inclined to Rabelais. A benefice at Meudon was given to him by another cardinal, Chatillon, but he held it for so short a time that the stock phrase, " Cure de Meudon," is something of an absurdity. He had another in Maine, but resigned both two years before his death in 1553. These main facts are pretty certain ; but the usual lives of Eabelais are chiefly legendary, and not a few things (such as the supposed enmity between him and Ronsard, on which large structures have been built) rest upon no evidence, and are more probably false than true.

All such things are, however, whether false or true, more or less immaterial to literature ; and it may be doubted whether we need care to know anything more about Eabelais personally than that he was a

196 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

monk, unfrocked by his own act, who turned to Hu- Gargantua and manisui and to Natural Science. And that Pantagruei. could be discovcred from his great book or books. This, for it is practically one, though it is generally (and in strictness correctly) known by the double short title of Gargantna and Pantagruei, was preluded by a new edition or version of an old bur- lesque romance concerning one of these personages, the good giant Gargantua. Eabelais seems to have first thought of simply continuing this, and published in 1532 the first book of the history of Pantagruei, Gargantua's son. Then, either changing his mind, or, as is at least equally probable, following out a design purposely eccentric, he went back and produced his own Gargantua in 1535, The second book of Panta- gruei did not appear till many years after, in 1546, nor the third till 1552. The conclusion did not see the light till twelve years later, and eleven after the author's death, though part of it, the lie Sonnante, had appeared a little earlier. This delay, with some alleged difierences of tone and temper, has led to its being considered spurious ; but the present writer has, after many years' study of the question, hardly the smallest doubt that it is genuine, though it was pretty certainly not finally revised by the author, and may have been rehandled by somebody else. The external testimony against it is of no weight, and the internal is all in its favour.^ It may without rashness be said

^ During the summer of 1900 it was stated in the newspapers that a new version of Book V., dated 1549, had been discovered in print. But I have seen nothing more about this.

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 197

that nobody in Eabelais' time, or near it, except Rabelais, could possibly have written the book, which contains some of the very best things of the whole. If the satire on monkery is a little fiercer than before, there is nothing fatal in that.

The apparently complicated and desultory character

of the whole work can be greatly simplified by a little

„ . , thought. In general form it is, as has been

Their general o o '

form and said, a burlcsquc romance — a greater part of the fun being drawn from the gianthood of the heroes in Gargantua than in the longer and more serious Fantagruel. The former book deals successively with Gargantua's birth, with the two stages of his educa- tion— the first sensual, disorderly, and ignorant, the later in the full strenuous tone of Eenaissance Humanism — his sojourn at Paris, and his victorious intervention in the war between his father, Grandgousier, and the petulant invader, Picrochole. The character of Priar John — a very muscular Rabelais himself — and the Abbey of Theleme, of which he is the first superior, and which is established on principles diametrically contravening those of the ordinary convent, are the chief episodes or minor parts of the plot.

Fantagruel, much longer, is also more diversified. It falls generally into three parts — the education of Fantagruel (a variant of the second part of his father's), his war with the Dipsodes (which in the same way corresponds to that with Picrochole), and the voyage in quest of the Oracle of the Dive Bouteille. This is undertaken partly to solve the doubts about marriage of the most famous character of the whole book,

198 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

Panurge, who occupies in this part more than the place of Friar John in the earlier, though that re- doubtable monk is great here also. Panurge, who be- comes one of Pantagruel's companions at Paris, and governor of one of his provinces after the conquest of the Dipsodes, has been the subject of much inkshed. He is an audacious but successful compound of divers bad qualities — cowardice, evil concupiscence, spite, and others — with one saving grace, that of extraordi- nary ingenuity and wit ; for, full of humour as Eabe- lais himself is, Panurge is witty rather than humorous. As for the Oracle of the Bottle, it is, of course, Trinq ! How could an oracle of a bottle be anything else ?

As nearly all books of any importance have given temptation to the besetting fancy for discovering Fantastic D^ares' ncsts, it would indeed be surpris- notixms on ing if guch a book as this had not done so. And the quest for these is itself a main cause of the puzzlement and the disgust which readers of this class have experienced. The wiser mind is aware that, in most cases probably, no single elaborately devised plan has ever been present to the mind of the greater authors : and that, in nearly all, such authors are led by their own genius to vary and alter any plan with which they may have started, until it is at best a trunk with infinite branches, and not seldom a mere central cottage round which a palace has grown. It is the business of special editors or critics of Eabelais — if indeed it be even theirs — to enumerate and, if they choose, to discuss the conjectures which have followed upon this initial fallacy. The wildest allegorical de-

FROM RHETOEIC TO PLEIAD. 199

bauches of the great Fulgentius Planciades (an author whom Master Francis knew, quotes, and beyond doubt appreciated with no small relish) have been equalled by the suggestion that the voyage to Bacbuc's oracle is an allegory of the processes of making wine. The " key " craze (a little excused by the fact that Eabe- lais openly introduces some real personages, and very probably adumbrates others) has been active to the fullest: and King Francis, his son Henry, Diane de Poitiers, Luther, Calvin, almost every distinguished and not a few undistinguished personages of the time, have been identified with this and that personage of Gar- yantua and Pantagruel. The unmistakable fact that Eabelais, though probably in no sense a Protestant by sect, was a protester against the abuses of the Eoman Church, and in particular against the degradation of monachism, while he as undoubtedly shared, though to an uncertain extent, the dislike of his nation and his time for mystical dogma, has, again unavoidably, tempted many to see in his work a deliberate and formidable assault on Catholicism or even on Chris- tianity. And a great deal else has been read into a book which, in the form and on the face of it, cer- tainly rather invites indulgence of an intemperance of this sort.

Let us on this point, without fear of losing the smiles of Bacbuc, be all but total abstainers. The side which s^aiiyasatiri. ^abelais would have taken— which to some cai criticism, extcut he actually did take — in the great quarrel or quarrels of the time is clear enough, and has been sufficiently indicated already.

200 EURO^AN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

He is against almost every form of that corruption of mediaeval religion, literature, manners, philosophy, which manifested itself in the Fifteenth Century; he is for the renewed and intelligent study of the classics, the purification of religion, the rejection of the mere formalisms of scholastic philosophy and canon -law, the pursuit of natural science. That he shared to some extent the excessive and unintelligent contempt of things mediasval, which is one note and one blemish of the Renaissance, is extremely probable and in fact evident. But it is absolutely impossible to hold the extremest view of his free-thinking tendencies without shutting the eyes to not a few (and these of the very best) passages in the book. To take it by itself (and as a matter of fact it has goodly company), the counsel of Hippothadee to Panurge can be read by no one not hopelessly prejudiced without his seeing that the writer had at any rate his moments of the truest and almost the sublimest piety, of the most wholesome moral sense, of the kindliest and most natural human sympathy. The same (with a variation due not wholly to the admission of humour) is the lesson of the advice of Rondibilis on the preventives of Cuckoldage. The education passages in Gargantua have extorted admir- ation, or impressed silence, in the case of all but fan- atics of anti-Pantagruelism. And though it has been less generally recognised, the picture of Quintessence fantastic, but adorable, with her houquet de rose franche,, mixes delicate poetry with pretty sharp satire in a way which few writers since Aristophanes have ever equalled. As for the strong shrewd sense of the

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. ' 201

criticism of life with which the book is saturated, we again find few deniers ; while denial when it occurs is so evidently the result of prejudice on other points that it may be politely neglected.

It appears most probable, from an unbiassed reading of the book, that Eabelais, like more than one other of the greatest of satirists (notably Fielding), began merely or mainly with sportive burlesque and parody, and was enticed by his own genius and the " grace of going on " to continue his work, to enlarge it, and to make it the vehicle, not merely of satire on the windy ways of men, but of some serious doctrine and expression of opinion, often indirect, sometimes straightforward and unveiled.

So far as general tendency goes, this satirical criti- cism of life sums it up, and we need go no further. But the criticism itself is of a very peculiar

Comparative •' -"^

quality 0/ the character, and possesses all the idiosyncrasy of genius. It is as agreeable as it is in- structive to compare it with that of Lucian (from whom it unquestionably derives to a great extent), with that of Swift (which in a similar but less degree is derived from it), and, if anybody pleases, with that of Voltaire. This last may be dismissed almost at once. "Witty as is the much lesser Francis, always sharp-edged and very often true-aimed as are his weapons, commend- able as his object is on occasion, though only on occa- sion, there is a thinness as well as a negativity about his satire which shows disastrously beside the full- blooded generous manhood of Eabelais. In the most debatable feature of both, the lusty licence of the Tourangeau looks almost clean beside the sniggering

202 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

indecency of the Parisian. But the contrasts with Lucian and Swift are far more valuable and satisfac- tory, for here the things compared are more on an equality. How much Habelais owes to Lucian must be apparent even to those who do not know the Samosatan well, while to those who do it occurs on every page. But while Lucian is free from some of the faults and many of the extravagances of Eabelais, this very freedom arises from a defect. The sin of the greatest of Post-Christian Greeks in literature is, as Photius long ago saw, that he is too negative — indeed, though he is less thin, he is more purely negative than Voltaire himself. He has absolutely no enthusiasms ; even his keen appreciation of sensual pleasure does not rise to passion, while his almost equally keen taste for art still falls short of anything likefuria. He believes in nothing, wishes for nothing very much, can excite himself about nothing. With Eabelais, on the con- trary, the steam is not only always up, as modern slang says, but up with a full head, and escaping through every safety-valve. His portentous catalogues are less calculated buffoonery, mere followings of medi- aeval precedent, than waste-pipes for superfluous and exuberant thought and language; his giantries and arithmetical fantasies are the same; liis very foul language and foul imagery are but as the smoke of the furnace. And the same enthusiasm, contagious to all but those incapable of it, enables his readers to go through with what he himself has written under its influence. Humanitarian sympathy is apt to be dis- gusting because it is apt to be mawkish. There is

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 203

nothing mawkish about Eabelais ; he is good fellow and good Samaritan at once; a visionary as well as a voluptuary ; a genuine believer in the possibility, if not of perfection, at any rate of amelioration, as well as a lover of the Septembral juice and of "pretty maids all of a row."

And as there is nothing in him of the Lucianic poco- curantism, so there is even less — Si Peu Que Bien, as he would say himself — of the Swiftian indignation and despair. The Oracle of the Bottle reads almost like a designed counterblast to the moral of Gulliver's Travels. That there are fools in the world Eabelais would admit with the utmost cheerfulness — in fact, he states the fact genially on every page. And he would probably by no means deny that there are rascals in it. But in his view most of the folly, and probably a large portion of the rascality, come simply from not " following nature " — not enjoying and letting enjoy the good things of God. If you do what you like, letting, of course (as is practically involved in the law), everybody else do what he likes under the same caution, the world will go very well. With Swift it is an impossibility that the world should go well, because, unfortunately, folly and roguery are themselves nature, and the more men follow her, the more they will be guilty of them. Less majestic and terrible than the Englishman, as he is less accom- plished and (within limits) consummate than the Greek, Eabelais is very much more inspiriting than either. His humour has iuttnitely more of good-humour about it : and that good-humour by no means arises, as has been too often unjustly thought, even by those not ill

204 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

inclined to him, from ribaldry or even from nonsense — great master as he is of the latter and only too prone to indulge in the former.

To these advantages we must add an extraordinary gift of felicitous and rememberable phrase, and a com- mand of French prose which would put him

The style. . .

in the first rank of writers whatever had been his subject. Few probably, even among French- men, realise the extent to which the phrase of Eabelais has penetrated the language : no one who does not know the older language can imagine the advance that he made in handling it. Quaint spelling, humorous exaggeration, fantastic word -coining, these things, no doubt, characterise him to no small ex- tent ; but if it were possible to cut them all out of his work, its simpler and more unaffected passages would still give him the very first rank. Still, there is no doubt that the union of these different appeals is what constitutes his special strength. There is hardly another writer who combines the wildest farce and the most serious sense in a manner so successful ; nor is there any, except Shakespeare, who has made his farce and his seriousness go so fraternally together. The hodge-podge of his sub- ject, while it exposed him to greater danger of failure, gave him at the same time, no doubt, greater chance of success. And for this reason a slight notice of passages and episodes may fitly close our handling of the greatest book — the only book, perhaps, except the Orlando, of absolutely the first class — that we have to notice in this volume.

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 205

Eabelais himself, in the Introduction to the Fourth Book, defines " Pantagruelism " as "a certain gaiety Short running of Spirit, Saturated with contempt of the commentary. Q^i^^^ of chancc." This is the old con- temptus mundi turned a new way. It is neither the self-sufficient superiority of the ancient philosopher, nor the sardonic-despairing " Vanity of Vanities " of the preacher, nor the half - childish frolicry of the mediaeval droller; but a combination of the three, altered and fortified by what (if the word had not been so foolishly and tediously abused) one might call the Modern Spirit. As an example of the difference given by this latter element, nothing better perhaps can be found than the delicious re- monstrance" of the Amiens Monk with the aesthetic ecstacies of Rabelais and his companion over Florence. The bulk of this, the charge against the " flower-town " that it contains not a single rotisserie, is exactly what we might find in Aristophanes and still more in Lucian. But the first three or four lines strike the note of variance, "I don't know what the devil you find here to praise so much. I have gazed at it as well as you, and am no more blind than you are. Well ! What then ? Here be fine houses and that's all." In these few words the loss and the gain of the modern, as compared with the ancient, world appears marvellously. The most matter-of-fact Greek could never have been simply insensible to the beauty of " fine houses," though the most transcendental Greek might affect to set that beauty lower than the beauty of the " things of the soul." But for this very reason

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the most ingenious Greek satirist was unlikely to think of the particular form of humour invited by vulgarity of this kind. And while the example is valuable in this way, it is perhaps more valuable as showing the strength, and at the same time the deli- cacy, of Kabelais' command of this humour. Only Pascal, among other Frenchmen, would have left it so artistically alone. Even Moliere, even Courier, much more Voltaire, would have been tempted to elaborate it, to force the note, to show some sign of fear that by itself it would not produce its effect. This highest — this Shakespearian — simplicity of humour is by no means uncommon in the writer whom critics have delighted to represent as incapable of uttering his jests without grinning at the same time through a dirty horse-collar. Not of course that Master Francis was at all squeamish about indulging in this latter exercise also ; while occasionally he could, as has been said, drop comedy and satire altogether, and be simply and nobly serious.

These characteristics, with his astonishing literary versatility and accomplishment, achieving the expres- sion— the frequently consummate expression — of them all, are displayed throughout the book, in manners and degrees conditioned to some extent necessarily, but to a less extent than might seem necessary, by the vary- ing nature of the subject. In Gargantua and in the First Book of Pantagruel, the pure burlesque extrava- gance of the original design — so far as (see above) there is likely to liave been any such — is perhaps more prominent than anywhere else, though it is noticeable

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD 207

that Gargantua itself contains, in the education passage and the description of the Abbey of Theleme, two of the most important and substantive pieces of serious- ness in the whole book. It is probable that such things as "The Antidoted Fanfreluches " at the very beginning are sheer mystification, except in so far as a parody may be intended, on the one hand, of the prophecies so popular in the Middle Ages — on the other, of the obscure and affected language of the MMtoriqueurs. So also a very large, perhaps the largest, part of the adventures of Gargantua, from his birth (and before) upwards, is mere parody of tlfe details of Enfances given in the Romances. Very frequently — too frequently for modern taste — the author gives the rein to the pure or impure fancies of the fatrcLsie and the fabliau ; while in such passages as the descant on Gargantua's livery-colours he mingles jest and earnest. The war with Picrochole, and the feats of Gargantua and Friar John, are once more parody of Romance, with a by no means unnoticeable side -glance at the elder and more stately muse of History herself.

In Pantagruel the parodist and parasitic vein is by no means abandoned ; indeed, the old sequence of " Enfances" " War," and " Quest " is the connecting canvas of the whole. But the author begins to give much freer play to his own genius. Friar John, the secondary hero of Gargantua, is only a livelier pre- sentment of the comic hero of apparently lower class, who goes back to the very first age of romance in the Eainouard of Aliscan^. Panurge, who occupies the

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same place (if indeed he be not promoted to first rank) in Pantagruel, is a very much more complicated and subtler creation. If there be one possible allegorical interpretation which is less of a Will-o'-the-wisp than another, it is that Panurge is a sort of satirical incarnation, not, as some would have it, of the more sensual and lower side of humanity generally, but of that of the French character, as it appeared to a typical but in some ways transcendent Frenchman. And the author seems to be in a hurry till he has reached this favourite companion and contrast to the hon Pantagruel, the prince of few words, shrewd but kindly thoughts, unblemished valour and sincere piety. Pantagruel's youth is very briefly treated : he escapes altogether his father's disorderly nonage. The jargon of the Limousin scholar, the fantastic-satiric catalogue of the library of Saint- Victor, the Pantagruelic Judg- ment of Solomon between Baisecul and Humevesnes are in the old kind ; but little time is spent over them. And after the advent of Panurge himself, or at least after his full production — for his first appearance pre- cedes the Judgment — the flights of fancy become ever more daring and more original. The sign - duel of Panurge and Thaumast would have delighted Lucian, that "knower of old things and vain." And though the war with the Dipsodes is, except as a mere carry- ing out as above of the general romance-plan, one of the obscurest and least interesting parts of the book, the boldness with which Eabelais, Humanist as he is, casts ridicule on the heroes and heroines of classical antiquity at once gives us his differentia from the mere

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 209

" atavists " of the Renaissance, from the men who would if they could have simply put back the clock to Greek and Roman times.

But we do not reach the full expression of the mingled wit and wisdom of our author till we come to tlie Third Book — the Second only of Pantagruel, but the more canonical as well as convenient numer- ation always regards Gargantua and its sequel as continuous. In the preliminary history of the mar- riage of Panurge it is of course possible, as elsewhere, to discover considerable borrowings ; in that matter Rabelais follows the practice of all the great masters before, during, and since his time. But the whole is as distinctly his own as is also usually the case. And here, better perhaps than anywhere, we can trace the working of " Pantagruelism " on the general donnies of Romance. The hero must have a lady-love ; and Master Francis at once accepts and evades the necessity in his quaintest and most wayward fashion. Nowhere has he brought in more out-of-the-way learning, keener satire on the ways and wishes of mankind. Nowhere has he indulged so little in mere extravagance, in mere nonsense. Nowhere does his satire on professions and schools of thought fly wider or on stronger wing. And nowhere has he coined rememberable phrase with greater abundance and greater felicity. The advice of Hippothadee and Rondibilis has been already noticed from one point of view ; but the latter is remarkable from many others. And all the scenes or chapters — the Sortes Virgilianm, the dream, the consultations with the Sibyl of Panzoust and the necromancer Her-

0

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Trippa, with the old French poet Eaminagrobis and the dumb Nazdecabre, with the ephectic philosopher Trouillogan and Triboulet the fool — form a close-knit chain of sense and satire, made more complete by the unbated and invincible resolution and ingenuity of Panurge, who explains everything in the teeth of its clearest meaning, so as to suit his wishes. Moreover, it is fitly continued by the episode of Judge Bridoye and his infallible method of judgment by dice — the most good-humoured, as the later account of the Chats FourHs is the most ferocious, of Rabelais' many attacks on lawyers — leading up to the resolve to visit the Oracle of the Bottle. Nor perhaps — though the grim satire of the " Herb Pantagruelion " (hemp), anticipating Joseph de Maistre, and showing that Rabelais' humanitarianism was of no foolish or milk - sop order, may seem purely episodic — could anything better terminate a book which, if not containing the absolutely best things, has the most uniformly sustained excellence of all the Five. Nor have judges missed the curious effect of the last ap- pearance in person of the good Gargantua, and the pleasant contrast of this appearance, as of a grave and gracious monarch solely busied on the welfare of his people and his son, with the former picture of the spoilt darling of the hoyden governesses and the clownish pupil of Master Jobelin.

There is no falling off in the Fourth as far as details go ; but as a whole it has less unity, less clearness, and less attraction. Many of the islands and countries visited are difficult to interpret, and

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 211

some, probably, have no definite counterparts in the world of sense or of thought. Nowhere perhaps has the Eabelaisian enumeration gone nearer to the tedious than in the chapters on Quaresme-prenant, while no- where is the sheer partisan more evident than in the description of the islands of the Papefigues and the Papimanes. As for the section of the Andouilles> it is partly unintelligible, and perhaps had better not be understood. Yet it is difficult to find many chapters — short as they are and long as is the book — which do not sparkle with the true Eabelaisian rock-salt. The quaint, if slightly inhuman, fabliaux of the drowning of Dindenault and the vengeance of the Lord of Basche, the immortal storm,^ the inimitable, if slightly unfair, personage of Homenas, the frozen winds, and "Messer Gaster," could not be spared. If on the whole the spirit is less kindly (a strong argument in favour of the Fifth Book), the construction more casual, the satire coarser, yet the hand is unmistakable, and has lost hardly any of its cunning.

To the present writer at least, as has been already remarked, that hand is quite as unmistakable in the Fifth. Nor would he admit any diminution, but rather contend for an increase in some parts of power and interest. The final exhortation of Bacbuc, with the more than Baconian splendour of its cele- bration of science and material progress, would by itself make the reputation of a great writer and a great thinker in his own way : and the fantastic

^ V. supra, P- 71) for the connection with Folengo.

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alternations of the grave and the gay which precede it are in Rabelais' most characteristic manner. I have already spoken of the Entelechie or Quintes- sence part; but I may repeat that, not merely in reference to the figure of " Queen Whims " herself but to much else, it is one of the most characteristic passages of the whole. It has been said that the satire on the " Furred Law Cats " is savage, and perhaps that of the Ringing Island itself is not less so. But we have observed that Rabelais' method in this kind hardened throughout — that the last undisputed book, the Fourth, is itself much less kindly than the First and Second, while there is a certain though not a very great darkening of tone even in the Third. The He Sonnante, moreover, is quite of the same archipelago as those of the Pape- figues and Papimanes ; while the Cliats Fourrds them- selves are but a climax, part of the lower steps of which are noticeable enough in the earlier books. Moreover, it cannot be too often repeated that, while these things, as well as the crudities of the Iks des Ferrements, of the dialogue with Frere Fredon and other things, are simply extremes of a scale equally noticeable elsewhere, there is even reason to believe that the master's last touches, which would or might have harmonised and humanised them all, were never given. Nor will some at least refuse weight to the argument that while at the close of the Fourth Book the scheme is obviously incomplete, the Fifth brings it to quite sufficient and satisfactory end. Not thus do the forgers and continuators of literature

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 313

work. The speech of these invariably bewrayeth them ; the speech of the Fifth Book is the true voice of our Esau.

But of this great book, almost more than of other great books, it may, or rather must be said, that no General account by abstract or critical summary, rermrks. thougli of far greater extent than any here possible, can be in the least satisfactory. Even extracts will not do ; for the variety of the book, whether in all cases deliberately calculated or not, is of its essence ; and when this variety is in any way hidden, the essence disappears. On the other hand, the humble office of the critic and literary historian recovers its importance, and is here, more than in most instances, in place, from more than one point of view. In the first place, even a candid reader who honestly attacks the book itself, is likely to be prevented from fully appreciating it by its outrageous desultoriness, by its daring, and, as it may well seem, wanton disregard of convention, by its constant direct or indirect dependence on previous models or butts, and, lastly, by some almost me- chanical eccentricities of form and dress. Strange as it may seem to those who are superior to the weakness, dialect or obsolete spelling undoubtedly does offend some tastes almost as if it were a per- sonal insult. And when such a man of letters as the late Mr Lowell could confess that the quaint English of the Scottish Eifteenth-century poets stood in the way of his enjoyment of them, it would be unreason- able to quarrel too much with those unfortunate

214 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— EAELIER RENAISSANCE.

persons, whether French or English, who are similarly offended by Eabelais. How much of his ortho- graphical caprices was due to himself, and how much to the habits of his printers, it would be difficult to say. But what is certain is that late fifteenth and early sixteenth century printers in French, almost more than in any other language, did take liberties with orthography. Some of these liberties were sprouts of the exaggerated Humanism of the time — • endeavours to get nearer the real or supposed ety- mology; some of them are mere fantasies, of the kind which has been summarised as the "putting of as many letters into a syllable as it will possibly bear."

But the office of the critic may be legitimately promoted in this case upon another consideration — which is, that it has been very freely and very recklessly exercised before. Few people who take an interest in literature at all are likely to come to the reading of Eabelais without very great preoccu- pation, which is quite as likely to be injurious in one direction as in another. Such an epitiiet as the old Elizabethan one of dirty Eabelais is not more misleading than the Augustan ticket of " Eabelais' easy-chair "j and there is some danger even in such a more laudatory description as Kingsley's " age when Eabelais was compelled to hide the light of his great wisdom not under a bushel, but under a dunghill." One does not think highly of any one who resorts to a dunghill to hide even wisdom.

Therefore there is still room — and more than mere

FEOM EHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 215

room — for a critic who will face the facts, disown altogether the " accusing excuse," and present Eabelais, as Eabelais wished to present his own hero, dans son naturel. That nature is the nature of a man of extraordinary genius, who is of fibre both coarse and fine, and who, in carrying out the principle that nothing human is out of his way, occasionally accepts the coarser humanities as well as the finer. The one defence for Eabelais in his weaker parts is, after all, that universal one of the time — the fact that, if he offends us, he acts and speaks with zest and relish to himself. There is none of the calculated and cold-blooded indecency in him which is sometimes so nauseous in Voltaire and Sterne ; nor is there that sense of forcing, of labour, of hypocrisy with the wrong side of the mask outward, which is so nauseous in at least some plays of Dryden. In mere nastiness Eabelais delights, as children and common folk delight in it: in what we widely call impropriety he delights, because the instincts to which it gives uncomely expression are natural instincts, and, if duly governed and refined, better than natural. Again, the imputation of atheism, or even of free- thought in the worse sense, is certainly false ; while, audacious as his criticism is in almost every respect, he can no more be justly termed an anarchist in politics than he can be called an atheist in religion.

On the pure credit side his assets are so great that one can only marvel at the undervaluation of them by any competent auditor. A wonderful fertility of

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fancy, which not seldom rises to actual imagination ; an astonishing vigour, hrio, " race " ; learning which is not so much carried lightly as itself made a means of progress — wings, not weight ; a purely literary gift or faculty of making language do what the user wants to make it do, which is hardly excelled by the greatest in literature. And for those who want something more still, who must have motive and moral, substance and subject, that real and intense desire for human happiness and welfare which has been more than once glanced at already. Some, of course, may question whether this is such a good thing — whether the " Verdammte Race " deserves sympathy, is capable of improvement, can produce any progress which is worth anything. These can, no doubt, make something of a case for their view ; but it is not so commonly held that the fact that Eabelais held the opposite one can fairly be counted to his discredit. You mai/ say some things against him, and some of these some things truly. But three things will remain. He is (let the competent gainsay if they dare) one of the great- est writers of the world ; he is one of the great satirists of the world ; and he is — as not all great writers and very few great satirists have been — one who sincerely and strenuously loved his fellow- men.

The contrast — a contrast obvious, hackneyed, and in fact clearly felt by the men themselves — between Rabelais and Jean Calvin (1509 - 1564) is not least remarkable in the point referred to by the last words

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 217

of the preceding paragraph. Calvin's love for his fellow-men was exclusively devoted to their

Calvin. i i • i p

souls, and even in that respect oi a very limited extension and a very peculiar kind. But with his character and his doctrines, we have, most fortunately, nothing to do. We have only to do with him as a writer — especially as a writer in French ; and more than one of his contemporaries, besides Servetus, might have been glad to escape further intercourse. Born at Noyon, in Picardy, of a family which had something to do with the Church and something with the law, he tried both professions ; but his adoption of the Eeformed opinions of course closed both careers to him in France. Basle, Ferrara under Eenee, and Geneva successively received him; and at the latter place he lived, with some intervals, for many years as a sort of anti-Lorenzo de' Medici, hating all vices but his own, all beliefs but his own, and all the softer arts and graces of life without excep- tion, till 1564, when he went to his own place. His work is considerable both in French and Latin. But the Latin need only concern us in so far as it exer- cised an inliuence on the French, while of the French the Institution Chritieyme alone need receive detailed criticism. It was first written in Latin and published at Basle in 1535-36. But the author himself trans- lated it into French, and issued it in that language in 1541 ; while, nineteen years later, he revised it, with some changes of style about which there are differences of opinion not necessary for us here to discuss.

218 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

Opinions differ also, it is believed, about the literary

merits of the French Institution itself. But some at

least who are certainly not biassed in its

Value of the •' _

Institution favour by agreement with the doctrine or xnsye. admiration of the man, think it by far the greatest literary book of the early Reformation. In beauty it cannot vie with the liturgical work of the Anglican reformers ; but that work is, as will be seen, extremely difficult to assign to any one person, and, besides, does not take form in any single original book of great merit. Nor is it such a contribution to French language as Luther's work was making to German ; but as a composition it is much better literature than anything that Luther produced. The nearest literary analogue to it, both in character and in the means by which that character is achieved, is the work of Ascham and some of his friends in English ; but Calvin's is far above this in positive merit of style. To appreciate this fully, it must be remem- bered that French prose, as usual, is much later than French verse, and that though in Calvin's time it had actually been practised and produced for more than three centuries, it had made rather surprisingly little progress. In only one of its kinds — history, or rather chronicle — had really great work been turned out, and this had exchanged the charming na'ivet^ of the best artists, from Villehardouin to Froissart, for the bom- bast of Chastellain, or the formless form that encloses the shrewd sense and wide range of Comines. Except in the comparatively young and limited short* prose tale, no other kind had done really well. Nor even in

FKOM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 219

their very best examples did memoir or chronicle, tale or story, provide the writer of graver prose with a style flexible, varied, efiective. Calvin did provide this. He did it by the only possible means — by the same means which Ascham adopted, but which were naturally more suitable to French than to English, and which were further facilitated in his own case by the circum- stances. He was translator of his own Latin into his own French, and he had only to adapt, with judgment and discretion, the style of Latin to the uses of her eldest daughter. In doing this he did not adopt that corrupt following of the older tongue which had been very mainly responsible for the disgusting frigidities of the BMtoriqueurs ; he did not attempt further to " de- spumate the Latial verbocination " into French. And he neither imitated the declamatoriness of Latin, to which French is only too well inclined of itself, nor fell into that other pit which has decoyed many great English writers — the construction of relative and other clauses, which, perfectly clear in the ancient language, become obscure in a modern one. Calvin's French style stands to Latin — by happy accident or deliberate and successful attempt — almost exactly as the French language itself stands towards its mother. And his greatest triumph is the attainment, by sedulous imi- tation of Latin, of a real prose clause — colon, " limb," as the Greek term more happily has it — capable of constructing in its turn a real sentence or body, ■whether long or short. All who know Old French well know that this is precisely the point in which it is deficient. Even in verse — though the line and the

220 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

couplet and the stanza help the writer almost auto- matically there — a tendency existed towards the merely natural arranging of words. In prose, without such help, and after the half-poetic turn of Villehardouin, the native grace of Froissart, had been lost, the ten- dency was either to ponderous word-heaps like those of the Rhdoriqueurs, or to clumsy locutions like those of Comines too often. Calvin changed all this, and the highest praise that can be given to him is that he not seldom approaches tlie still greater but rare achieve- ment of that one of his contemporaries whom he pretty certainly regarded with the bitterest loathing, and who, with as much probability, returned the compliment by sovereign contempt — that is to say, of Eabelais himself.

As we might expect, the " minorities " of the second

quarter of the century are of more importance than

„. . . those of the first. In verse, many writers

of the of some, and a few of remarkable talent,

'"^' group themselves (not always in friendly

fashion) round Marot. In prose, at the other end of

the scale from Calvin, not a few writers of Contes, with

the interesting figure of Queen Margaret at their head,

cluster round Eabelais, and to a great extent imitate

him.

Marguerite de Valois (1492 - 1540), also styled

d'Angouleme from her father, d'Alen^on and de Navarre

iiargvenu de f rom her husbands, is one of those persons,

vaiou. jjqJ; ^qq common in life or in literature, who

are the better liked the more they are known. She

belongs to history; and though her lot was what is

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 221

called in the hackneyed phrase " brilliant " enough, it was scarcely happy. Her love for her brother, the showy but rather worthless King Francis, seems to have been deep and sincere ; but it was rewarded by the ribaldry of the time with a base slander, and by its object with ingratitude and neglect at the last. It is pretty certain that both her husbands were unworthy of her, and it is not clear that either cared for her much. On the other hand, though not exactly a beauty, she seems to have been able to excite in courtiers, literary and other, not merely the lip- worship common from courtiers to queens much less attractive than herself, but something like a real passion. And though at last she was check- mated and thrown aside, she was able earlier to exercise a great deal of political influence with good effect, and to bring about some excellent literature.

How much of that ^ which goes under her name (and which in the poetical division has been even increased lately) is wholly hers, it is very difficult to determine. That the French royal house had the spirit of letters in it, at least before the Bourbon blood came in, is sufficiently proved by Charles of Orleans. There is no reason to grudge her her verse, which is varied enough, comprising farces, mysteries, allegorical religious pieces, and much else. The merit of all is average, of some

^ The ffeptameron has been repeatedly printed ; most accessibly in the Gamier collection. An essay on the book was contributed by the present writer to a recent translation in English, which has appeared in several forms. The best edition of the Poems, Les Marguerites de la Marguerite, is that of Franck, 4 vols., Paris, 1873 ; but additional pieces have since been discovered.

222 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCK

a little above this; and it is fair to Marguerite to say that she frequently hits upon the melancholy resonance which was to be the note of the best Huguenot verse, though she herself was not much more than half a Huguenot. This melancholy, which in nations outside Italy is a mark of the Eenaissance, quite independently of religious motives, and is in fact a sort of raising and philosophising of mediaeval tones, reappears eminently in some stories about her, and to some extent in the Heplameron itself.

This very remarkable book, which has as a rule been undervalued, presents almost equal attractions Xhe to those who read for mere amusement, to

Heptameron. t,hose who appreciate literature as litera- ture, and to those who like extra-literary puzzles of various kinds from authorship to allusion. Combining, as we have a right to do here, the two first points of view, we may say that it is the best of all collections of novelle on the Italian plan, except the great original, and that in one respect Marguerite has surpassed Boc- caccio. The framework personages of the Decameron are notoriously very shadowy ; except the naughty audacity of Dioneo, and to some extent of Neifile, there is hardly anything characteristic about them. But Oisille and Saffredent, Nomerfide and Emarsuitte, Par- lamente and Hircan, especially the two last, are real people, with parts and characters very distinctly and dramatically outlined. This distinctness and dramatic character have aggravated the usual temptation in such cases to " key "-making — to the attempt to identify the personages. It is sufficient to say that this always

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 223

idle game is here rather more idle than usual. The attraction of the actual arrangement, however, is very- great, and it is partly due to the contrast — also want- ing in Boccaccio — of the merriment (not seldom passing the bounds of strict decency) of many of the tales with the polished manners and character -interest of the framework, with the constant undercurrent of melan- choly though voluptuous meditation above referred to, and, lastly, with a very real religious feeling, which has seemed dubious or impossible to those who will persist in ignoring time and place, but which was natural enough in the Renaissance. Doubts, however, may be raised about the actual authorship of the book as a whole, with more reason than usual in such cases.

It was never published by the Queen or in her life- time, and, when it did appear, it was in an incomplete Bmiaventure form. Under the not-at-all appropriate title Desperiers. q£ £gg Amauts FoHuTi^s. Furthcr, many of the men of letters of the time were members of her court, and there was one who is especially noteworthy. This was Bonaventure Desperiers,^ a short-lived and ill-starred writer of great talent, whose exact birth and death dates are both unknown. But the whole of his days were pretty certainly included within our half century, and he seems to have committed suicide, either in a fit of madness, or to save himself from slaughter for unorthodox opinions, rather of the char-

^ For the NouveUes Ricreations ct Joyeux Devis I use the edition of Qosselin (Paris, 1843), with preface by Nodier and notes by the BibUo- phile Jacob ; for the Cymbalum Mundi the Amsterdam edition of 1732.

224 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

acter of free - thought than of Protestantism. Of opinions of this kind there is no trace in the He.j)- tanuron, and we may be certain, from all the Queen's other work, and from all really recorded testimony about her, that she would have sanctioned nothing of the kind. But Desperiers left another book, also not pub- lished till posthumously, which is curiously like and yet curiously unlike the Hcptameron itself. This is the so-called Nouvelles Rdcrdations et Joyeiio: Devis, a work consisting of a large number of mostly very short tales. Although told with such brevity that in some cases one cannot but suspect an intention to rewrite and expand, they are singularly effective, sometimes superior in vividness and force of style to the Hej)- tameron itself, and here and there displaying that same melancholy note which has been spoken of above. Now, did Desperiers help his mistress ? did she inspirit her servant ? or can the two be quite independent ? We can only guess the answer.

However this may be, the Heptameron itself is, if not a great, a singularly attractive book, and the Nouvelles r/ie Nouvelles R^cr^ciHons are not unworthy to keep it Recreations. Company, always remembering that they are in a different style. They are far less finished, nearer to the old popular /aWiaw-spirit, and in most cases, though not in all, destitute of the urbane and polished tone which makes itself felt even in some pretty coarse chapters of the Queen's book. We are — to take imagery from Rabelais — not so much in the Court of Quintessence (with which gracious image one is not seldom tempted to associate Margaret her-

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 225

self), as in the society of Panurge and Friar John. But these two atmospheres were at the time so con- stantly close to each other, if not so subtly and inex- tricably blended, that little sense of incongruity need be felt by those who have really appreciated the Renaissance either in Italy or in France.^

The Cymhalum Mundi, on the other hand, is one of the examples of the truth of a certain proverb about TAc cynibahiin ^ogs and bad namcs. It seems, or has been Mundi. sKid, to havc been the cause, direct or indi-

rect, of its author's death. It was constantly spoken of as on a level with the mythical Dc Trihus Impostori- bus, as a blasphemous attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular ; it was all but utterly sup- pressed, and when, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Prosper Marchand reprinted it from a nearly unique copy and defended it from the charge of atheism, its enemies resorted to the not unusual stratagem of declaring that if it was not wicked it was dull. The truth is, that, though not a pious work, it is by no means very wicked ; and that, though by no means very witty, it is not open to the charge of dulness. It is a direct imitation of Lucian, and people do not often imitate Lucian in a spirit of

^ The ffeptavieron and the NouveUes Recreations are the chief ex- amples of this Conic-literature, which continued throughout the century and into the next. But the Court of Marguerite was a very nest of the form — for instance, Boaistuau and Le Ma(;on, the translators of Bandello and Boccaccio, were of her train. The chief minor works are the earlier ones of Noel du Fail (1520-1591), Propos Rustiques and BallvemcrieSy and the odd Pierre Fai-Feu of Charles de Bordigue, of whom not much is known.

22 G EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

ardent piety ; nor is it at all impossible that, in an age when the scandalous controversies of Catholics and Protestants were aggravating the Humanist in- differentism into positive anti-religion, Desperiers may have written in a spirit at least Voltairian. But a good deal, not merely of rather arbitrary dotting of the i's and crossing of the t's, but of italicising and under- lining, not to say glossing and garbling, is needed before the book becomes in any sense anti-Christian. It consists of four short dialogues. In the first. Mer- cury, sent down to earth to get the Book of Destiny rebound because it is loose in its covers, is out- matched in his own trade of cheat and thief by two Athenian rascals whom he meets at a tavern, and who steal the Book, substitute a volume of earthly statutes, and set up as fortune-tellers with their prize. The second is a satire on the Philosopher's Stone (Truth broken into fragments by sects). In the third, after Mercury has accidentally made a horse speak by pronouncing the words of power, the animal tells his master some home - truths ; and the fourth is a dialogue of two dogs, adjusted to the same obvious purpose of satire on humanity. It needs, of course, very little ingenuity to turn the Book of Destiny into the Bible, to make the talking horse a satire on miracles in general, and Balaam's Ass in particular, and so forth ; but it is at least a question whether the intelligence which is thereby shown is much greater than the ingenuity which is therein required.^ At

^ Even Charles Nodier was misled, and has misled others on this head, by that curious anti-clerical tendency which has always been so

FROM RHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 227

any rate, the book, disregarding alike its reputation of scandal and its disrepute by partisans, is a much less remarkable literary achievement than the Nouvelles Enervations. It is, in fact, little more than one of the many proofs of the vast influence which Lucian ex- ercised over the Eenaissance, an influence which up to the present time has been rather underrated. Desperiers is indeed much less at home in the form of the dialogue than in that of the conte. If the Gymhalum Mundi be compared with the Colloquies, or even with such a minor example of Latin dialogue as Eekius Dedolattis, the unreadiness for this particular form, even of French, the most accomplished, next to Italian, of the vernaculars, will be almost sufficiently demonstrated. For that Desperiers was a man of keen wit, and a master of such French as was at his disposal, cannot be doubted.

We must now turn to the poets, and of many mention at least four. Mellin {i.e., Merlin) de Saint- Mdiinde Gelais^ (1487-1558) has not been a very saint-Geiau. great favouritc of late years, either in other countries or even in his own. But he can be read with pleasure still ; and he has his special inter- est for the historian because he is a link of union between the school of Marot and the Pleiade, between the older French style of poetry and the new Italian- ated singers. He was actually an older man than

strong in Frenchmen of letters. It is odd to see liow the inquisi- torial habit of discovering mare's-nests infects these anti-inquisitors. ^ In the Biblioth&que Elz^virienne, ed. P. Blanchemain, 3 vols., Paris, 1873.

228 EUROPEAN LITEEATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

Marot himself, and survived him by many years. If his father was really Octavien de Saint-Gelais, he had both good blood and fair poetry by inheritance. It is certain that in his younger years he not merely visited Italy, as did many Frenchmen then, on warlike errands, but actually studied at her most famous universities — Padua and Bologna. He entered the Church, was freely patronised, and obtained a considerable position by his verse — a position which he did not lose, though he set himself against the rising stars of the Pleiade, and which (more remarkable still) was actually at last accepted by themselves.

Some histories of literature gave a great deal of space to these literary quarrels, with which the pre- sent period was much infested, from that of Marot and Sagon, with " Marotiques " and " Sagontiques " on each side, to the probably imaginary one between Eabelais and Eonsard ; while Italy is at least equally full of them, from that between Aretino and Berni to the wrangling, after our time, over the Gerusalcmme Liberata. But all such things had better be ban- ished, as very many of them have been already, to their special valley in the Moon ; and it is devoutly to be hoped that no Astolfo will ever bring them back again.

Besides being something of a scholar, Mellin was also much of a musician, and his double studies are perceptible in their result, the remarkable harmony of his verse. It cannot be said to be of extraordinary vigour, or to possess great depth of meaning. But it is always graceful and polished in style, as well as

FROM EHETORIC TO PLEIAD. 229

singularly satisfactory to the ear. And it shows "the meeting of the waters" as does no other verse of our period. Side by side with the sonnets, which Mellin almost certainly introduced into French liter- ature, and which in turn he helped to hand on to English/ are a crowd of pieces in the ancient forms, rondeaux, &c., and in those more modern and simpler dixains, huitains, &c., which Marot had made fashion- able. In all these, and especially in his epigrams, Mellin de Saint-Gelais ranks fairly with Marot at all but the latter's very best : and while he has not Marot's usual grace, he often escapes his occasional triviality.

Three poets, or rather two poets and a poetess, of

curious grace, if not of much strength, may close the

Magny, ^^^^- Thesc are Oliver de Magny (? -1560),

Tahureav, Jacqucs Tahureau (1527-1555), aud Louisc '

Louise LaM. ^^^, ^1526.1566) Magny and Tahureau

show something of Pleiade influence ; but the first died only ten, the second only five years later than the middle of the century. Magny ^ was a townsman of Marot by birth, a lover of Louise Lab^ by choice. He died very young ; but his genius rather than his youth should be credited with his escape from the stiffness into which Eonsard and his school sometimes relapsed

^ Wyatt (v. infra, p. 265) translated some of his. Mellin 's com- petitor for the honour of introducing this form (which has indeed never given such good results in French as in English) is Ponthus de Thyard, one of the outlying members of the Pldiade, and now and then certainly a better practitioner than Mellin himself. But dates and other things give a probable, if not an absolutely certain, priority to Saint-Gelais.

^ Ed. Courbet. 5 vols., Paris, s.d.

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after Marot had got rid of it. Tahureau,^ even sooner taken from the world, had given still better poetry before he left it. His delightful title of Mignardises Amoureuses dc I'Admirde gives the very savour of his work — a little not ungraceful affectation, a great deal of genuine sweetness, and not a little real passion. He had the good sense not merely to admire but to marry his beloved. Louise Labe,^ " La belle Cordiere," is one of the most considerable poetesses, perhaps the most considerable poetess, of France, and inspires her work with that touch of melancholy passion which is so rare in French writers of the male sex, but which in at least two other instances, of prose and verse respectively — Julie Eleonore de Lespinasse and Marcelline Desbordes- Valmore — has been attained by French women.

And so we may leave a part of our subject which — in one instance of the highest, in two or three others of high interest — ^is not, either in the whole history of its own division of literature, or in that horizontal survey which we are pursuing, of the very first im- portance. Without Rabelais, France, though above England for the time, would not be so very far above her ; both countries would present pretty equally the spectacle of a transition not yet finished, of school- work, of the experimental and the immature. With Eabelais she has no country to envy; but then Rabelais, intimately as he is connected with his time, is one of the great chance-medleys of literature in his real and essential quality.

^ Ed. Blancheinain. 2 vols., Geneva, 1869. 2 Ed. Tross. Paris, 1871.

231

CHAPTER IV.

THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITEKATUllE.

OPENING AND GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD IN ENGLAND — CAUSES OP THESE — IN LANGUAGE, GRAMMAR, AND METRE — IN PROSE STYLE — IN DRAMA — MORE — ELYOT — THEOLOGICAL POLEMIC — LATIMER — THE TRANSLATORS AND LITURGISTS — PUZZLES OF THEIR WORK — ITS UNSURPASSED LITERARY QUALITY — THE CAMBRIDGE PKOSE-MEN — CHEKE — WILSON — HIS ' ART OF RHETORIC' — " INK- HORN terms" — ASCHAM — THE POSITION AND WORK OP WYATT AND SURREY — THEIR POETIC VALUE — THEIR MODELS AND MASTERS — THEIR MEANS AND METHODS — THE ENGLISH SONNET — THE "POULTER'S measure," ETC. — BLANK VERSE — SOME OTHERS — TU8SER AND HEYWOOD — THE ' PROVERBS ' AND 'EPIGRAMS.'

It is by no raeans out of accordance with the rule of things in literature and life that the English Eenais- openingand saucc, which was to i^roduce by far the Sr^ir^r greatest literary results of the whole move- England. ment, had an overture, and even something much more than an overture, of portentous and almost unexampled length and dulness. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Scottish division, with men like Dunbar and Douglas, was indeed more than respectably furnished; but this has been dealt with

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already/ and was in fact an almost entirely isolated phenomenon, due less to natural growth than to intelligent but artificial imitation. It had next to no sequel, or such as may best be briefly despatched at the end of this chapter, ■ In England, at first sight, there is nothing at all to show but men like Hawes, Barclay, and Skelton in verse - — the first, a swan-singer of mediaeval music, half graceful, half awkward, as swans are on earth and in water respectively ; the second, a plodder of no genius and not much talent ; the third, an eccentric exception : — in prose, men like Berners and Fisher,^ whose real importance it requires no little study fully to realise. But the most remark- able thing is not so much that the curtain rises on so weak a cast, as that the stage remains for so long in- adequately occupied. More than three quarters of the century — nearly tlie whole of three conventional generations — has to pass before any real substantive progress is made : our own period proper closes as it had begun, re infccta, or at best with such compara- tively slight advance — itself to be for long not much further advanced upon — as the work of the later Tottel's Miscellanists in verse, and that of Ascham in prose.

This phenomenon is at first sight so odd that some, either wilfully or for lack of eyesight, have declined to recognise its existence; exaggerating the positive — it is not easy to exaggerate the transitional — importance of Wyatt and Surrey, and finding a " Father of English Prose " in an estimable practitioner like More, who

^ See The Transition Period, chap. ii. ^ Ibid., chap. i. •* Ibid., chap. x.

THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 233

did his best work in Latin. Others, following the usual line, have laboured to the utmost the theory about Literature being an " expression of national life." The nation, it seems, was too busy with religion, politics, social changes, to have leisure for literature ; just as, if these three quarters of a century had been an active literary time, we should have been told that this activity was a reflection of the other. It would be wiser to take the merely devout line of Grand- gousier, and to say that at this period England had not a great literature because it did not please God that she should have it. And, undoubtedly, there is very much to be said for that point of view. Yet we may, perhaps, before beginning the actual survey of what was, and in order to clear our eyes for that survey, submit some of the considerations which to some extent account for the absence of what was not — reasons which ought to be familiar, but which, if one may judge from the evidence at hand, are perhaps not so generally comprehended or accepted as they should be.

The first, the most obvious, the most important, of these reasons, but perhaps still one not quite com- pletely recognised, is the peculiar character

Causes of these. » , -r-, t , ,

of the English language — a character on which mere pliilology throws very little light, if, indeed, it does not distinctly obscure the field and dis- tort the vision. Modern English is, of all great literary languages, the least of a natural growth or even a chemical compound, the most of a mechanical blend or adjustment. The purely English or Anglo-Saxon, the

234 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

French, and the Latin elements in it, not to mention the smaller constituents, have simply taken their shapes by a secular process of rolling and jumbling together, like the pebbles on the sea-shore or the sweet- meats in a confectioner's copper basin. From this mere attrition, this mere shaking together, English grammar, English prose style, and English prosody have resulted. And this process took — could not but take — centuries before it could turn out results suitable for a Spenser or a Shakespeare, a Hooker or a Bacon. The real reason v^hy the results of a method so apparently accomplished as Chaucer's were mere botch-work in the hands of his purely native followers, was that Chaucer came too early, and when this process of attrition had not gone on long enough. Dante, dealing with a language like Italian, homogeneous in itself, however various in dialect, was able to do his work once for all — not that Dante gives us complete modern Italian, either in grammar or even in prosody, but that there are no fundamental difierences. Chaucer could do nothing of the kind. The philologers who ask "Whether Chaucer did not know his own lan- guage ? " and so force on him chimerical uniformities of rhyme and syntax, may be asked in turn, " How, then, do you account for what followed ? " They can- not account for it. The literary historian can.

In other words, Chaucer, by main force and gigantic dead - lift of individual genius, had got the still Jnta7i3w«<7e,?ram- imperfectly adjusted materials of English mar, and metre. -^^^ ^ shape Sufficient for architecture of permanent and beautiful design. But when this force

THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 235

and this skill were taken away, the rough-edged or crumbling materials of language, the not fully organised devices of grammar and metre, were insufficient to make anything but more or less shapeless heaps. Skelton may have evaded the difficulty by adopting rococo forms ; Surrey and, earlier still, Wyatt, by taking liberties with accent or quantity on the one hand, improving grammar on the other, and borrowing the constraining stay of the sonnet or the liberty of blank verse from more accomplished languages like Italian, may have made actual progress towards the true English style. But all this demanded time, ex- periment, unsuccessful as well as successful, and an amount of individual genius which simply did not happen to be available for the moment, or for many moments.

The prose-writers had an apparently more difficult

but really easier task. They were not misled, in the

very act of being assisted, by intrinsically

In prose style. i i • i

consummate, but relatively premature and exceptional, work like Chaucer's. Chaucer's own prose, interesting and important as it is, has nothing of the exceptional and almost portentous character of his verse. It fits (with due allowance for the exceptional talent of its author) easily and naturally into the suc- cession of its kind, from tlie Ancren Rude and the various theological exercises of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It is itself succeeded as naturally by fresh applications and developments. The prose-writers of the fifteenth century are not, like the verse-writers of it, endeavouring to draw a bow

23G EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

which is not only too strong for them, but of which the yew is dry-rotted and the string frayed by time and weather. They have a great deal to do; they have not done very much as yet. But they are putting prose more and more to its naturally multifarious or rather infinite uses ; they are accumulating the vocabulary ; they are discovering, either by mere practice, or by borrowing, sensibly or insensibly, from the French and Latin originals, whom they almost inevitably follow, the varieties of style ; they are shaping grammar by using it. In one great instance — that of Malory — they have already done a great deal more than this : they have actually made, once for all, a style that cannot be surpassed for its particular purpose. And now, in our own period, in Fisher and in Berners, we find them achieving something only less great. Berners, indeed, like Malory, " comes to the end " : of the myriad purposes of prose he has found one which he can discharge excellently, but which will not need, in that particular way and style, to be discharged again. Fisher is much less positively satisfactory and interest- ing to us ; but he is even more important to history, because he is trying the rhetorical devices, forming the tools of style, for purposes other than his own, as well as for his own itself.

Nor perhaps does this at first sight humdrum and disappointing period show less well, when it is ex- amined in the third great division, hybrid

In drama. i p i

between prose and poetry, that or drama. Unfortunately we are here in a difficulty which does not beset us either in regard to poetry or in regard to

THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 237

prose : to wit, that we are in many, if not in most cases, almost wholly ignorant not merely of the personality of the writers, but even of their approximate dates. What we do know is that at this time, partly as a matter of natural development of or from the kinds of the mediaeval mystery, morality, and farce, partly as a direct result of the study of the classical drama, especi- ally Seneca on the one side and Terence on the other, dramatic attempts are made which, though not in a single case resulting in a perfect comedy or tragedy, yet express a distinct advance towards the two great types of modern drama. But the detailed items of this will be for the general dramatic chapter. The pre- sent will be limited to the accomplishments — a poor thing, but our own — of English poets and prose-writers proper between the rough limits of 1500 and 1550.

This poverty is aggravated by the ordinance which has handed over the most important writers of the earlier century to the preceding volume. Of the three poets who alone, for this period, have substantive claims, Barclay actually outlived the strict limits of our own time by a year or two. Skelton saw nearly the whole of its first three decades, and Hawes probably more than its first two. Yet are they distinctly repre- sentative of the past, if in Skelton's case partly of dis- satisfaction with that past; inheritors of almost wholly Chaucerian tradition ; men of the fifteenth century, not the sixteenth. And so we have to leave them, with only a little allusion. The giants and the monsters of Hawes had, there can be little doubt, a real influence on Spenser, and though of his two alle-

238 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

gorical hounds, Grace and Governaunce, the former was not always with him, and the latter, in the sense of Criticism, a most truant and unmindful companion, yet he keeps a certain intrinsic charm. Barclay, the least charming of the three, is the most modern in tone : his Eclogues, if not his Ship of Fools, savour of the Renaissance not a little. Skelton, as is the wont of those whose genius inclines to the satiric, is, though intensely interested in his time, half outside of it. As with Aristophanes, as with Lucian, as with Butler, as with Swift, his occasions are temporary, but his quality is extra-temporal. So we must deny ourselves recurrence to his graceful celebrations of Isabels and Margarets, to the vigorous foulness of the Tunniny, and the grotesque strength of Wliy Come ye not to Court ? And the same must be the case with Fisher and with Berners. But Fisher's .younger companion in misfor- tune. More, and one or two others, may receive some notice here before we turn to the really representative figures of the School of Elizabethan Literature.

Sufficient reasons — at least reasons which seem suf- ficient to the writer — have been given in the notice of More included in the chapter on Humanism (su2yra, p. 86) for refusing to consider the Utojna among English books. But the Chancellor's actual work in English is not inconsiderable, though both in subject and in style it is quite inaccurate to estate him as "Father of English Prose." Indeed there are strong doubts how far one of its most re- markable constituents, the History of Edward V. and Eicliard III., is really his : and how far it may be the

THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 239

production, perhaps in Latin, of his patron Cardinal Morton. It is very well written, but by no means so much, ill advance of other work of the time as has sometimes been said. Another division of More's prose consists of tracts against tlie Protestants — not quite so free from the rough-and-tumble argumenta- tion or objurgation of the time as those who regard More as a pattern of sweet reasonableness would wish, and not always attaining the level of force at which partisan virulence may be almost or quite forgiven. He was a writer of verse as well as of prose, but the most notable thing in his verses is an attempt to extend the seventh line of the rhyme-royal into an Alexandrine, in which some have seen a possible — and the only possible — original of the great Spen- serian stanza.^ It is perhaps enough to say, first, that More's extension is not uniform, and may be a mere accident; secondly, that the rhyme -royal is not a stanza of substance quite sufficient to bear the Alexan- drine at its end. It is the extraordinary homogeneity, the proportion as of pre-established harmony, in the Spenserian itself, which shows that it must have been a stroke of genius on the part of its inventor.

The chroniclers, Graf tons and Halls and what not, of

the time need no detailed notice, nor does Leland, an

invaluable friend to literature, but himself

Blyot.

only a journeyman of letters. Sir Thomas Elyot (1490-1546) may perhaps have a little more

^ The poem is on the death of Ehzabeth of York, and the final lines are lengthened, that each may end with the words, " for lo, now here I lie ! " It may be found quoted in Warton (ed. Hazlitt, iv. 90).

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room, if but by patent or precedent. He has indeed been rather accidentally fortunate in having had the honour and advantage of reprint, bestowed, not merely once but twice during the nineteenth century, on his chief work, the Govemour} This book displays the positive mania for paedagogy, which is a main note of the time all over Europe, and which, only a little altered and conditioned, shows itself also in his other works, especially the medical Castle of Health. That Elyot meant to be a man of letters, and to some extent was so, there can be no doubt. The Governour, a most well-intentioned work on the old Plutarchian lines, but much developed, quite observes its own precepts in speaking English, which is "clean, polite, and articulate -pronounced." But it has no particular distinction, and for once its matter is of more purely literary importance than its style. We have better examples of the same drift elsewhere, but not in English: and though the com- mendation of Homer, Virgil, Lucan, and Silius Italicus to some extent continues the haphazard confusion of the Middle Ages, yet Elyot, like the rest of the Humanists, perfectly well knows what he is doing in commending the classics generally.

Logically, as well as for reasons of convenience, we are fully entitled here to take the entire theological and religious-controversial work of the period in Eng- land together. It will divide itself very well into three heads, the first and third mainly grouped, the . second including one remarkable individual name.

^ The latest, most accessible, and best edition is by H. H. S. Croft* 2 vok. 4to. (London, 1883).

THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 241

That is to say, (1), the Controversialists, in verse and prose, of the Reformation battle on both sides ; (2), Latimer ; (3), the translators of the Bible and the compilers of the Anglican Liturgy.^

Of the first we may make short work, voluminous as the division is, and distinguished as are, in some Theological ^6w cases, the names of the persons who polemic. contributed to it. Eeligious controversy has sometimes produced good, and even sometimes also great, literature, but not at this time. Even style could not at the moment hope to find any such expo- nents as were furnished later by Parsons^ to some extent on one side, and by Hooker still later, and to a far greater extent, on the other.

In few countries did railing take the place of reason, the bludgeon of the rapier, more uniformly than in England. As for the pamphlets and lampoons in verse and prose, the examples of the Wyclifites, and even of such non-Wyclifites as Langland (who came again into much notice now) earlier, and of Skelton at the very cock-crow of tlie day itself, were not wholesome. And such half-famous things as Eoye and Barlow's Head me and be not Wroth, with Fish's Supplication &/

' There is an excellent thesaurus of these divisions in the pul)lica- tions of the Parker Society about the middle of ti>e nineteenth cen- tury. The larger part of the 55 vols, no douljt only concerns his- tory or controversy ; but literature claims Latimer, Cranmer, Cover- dale, and others.

- I must confess that I think Parsons has earned his reputation in this respect rather lightly ; but his partisans, from Swift to Swift's biographer, Sir Henry Craik, are neither to be spoken of without respect nor provoked without temerity.

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the Beggars, and the rather ingenious, though of course wholly one-sided, John Bon and Mast Parson, are, whether verse or prose, rather curious than admirable, and very much more aggressive than convincing. Of men like Bale and Foxe, the former of whom will have his deserts in our dramatic chapter, while the latter, in respect of his most famous work, comes after our time, it can only be said that, while neither shows much literary gift in form, both must, with impartial judges, choose between the status of impudent lying, and that of sadly unscrupulous, if not utterly blind, partisanship. With such a wise historian we need not and will not deal, in such a book as this : especially as both they and the whole class have but the vaguest and most general connection with our matters. Con- troversy, however ill-written on subjects of great general interest, necessarily exercises the powers of writers and whets the appetite of readers : and this is, as a rule, except in such rare cases as that of the Provinciales, about its only literary merit.

One, however, who can hardly be acquitted entirely of being a partisan — though if he that way sinned, the fire in front of Balliol should surely have served as his sufficient purgatory — nevertheless, partly by his moral, and still more by his literary qualities, rises far above this welter of men and serpents, who from time to time change each into the other form. That Hugh Latimer ^

^ The standard edition of his not extensive work is that of Corrie (Parker Society, as above, 2 vols., London, 1843-45). Two vols, of Mr Arber's invaluable reprints contain some of his best sermons.

THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 243

fl490 ?-1555) had any intellectual or philosophical quarrel with Eoman theology may be doubted ; though his valiant soul and healthy conscience made him throw up his mitre, and put the head that bore it in considerable danger, by refusing the Six Articles. It is not so much probable as certain that his adherence to the doctrines of the Eeformation arose mainly, as similar adherence did in so many other cases, from the association of the contrary doctrines of the Church of Eome with corruptions in practice, wherein less heated times have seen no necessary consequence of these doctrines at all. It is exceedingly difficult, for instance, to believe that to a man like Latimer Transubstantiation itself can ever have been either acceptable or incredible on strictly philosophical grounds ; while outside of philosophy his natural piety would have made him admit that with God nothing was impossible. But Transubstantiation, like the confessional, the private mass, and the denial of the cup, was a most powerful support to that inordinate position and power of the clergy which revolted the conscience of men like himself, priests as they were, only less than the shameless immorality which these doctrines indirectly shielded. Therefore Latimer, a shrewd, clean-living, affectionate English- man, not too refined, not in the least subtle, with an enthusiasm for the wellbeing of the people at large, a hatred of tyranny and vice, and an almost fanatical love of justice and fair-play, was a Reforiner, and could not but have been one unless he had had the reach and grasp necessary to foresee the dangers of Reform.

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We may dwell unwontedly on points of this kind, because for once the personal nature of the man is so directly reflected in the literary nature of his work that the latter cannot be understood without the former. Here, if anywhere, the true version of the saying " le style c'est Vhomme meme " applies ; and it is as impossible to understand Latimer's work without understanding him as it is to understand that of his great, but morally inferior, modern analogue, Cobbett, without understanding Cobbett himself and his views. Like Skelton, but much more so, Latimer stands outside his time, except in so far as that time gave him his immediate subjects. And he is even more "disengaged" than Cobbett, because he had, unlike Cobbett, no Bunyan and no Swift to " play the sedulous ape " to in his youth. At all times he would have been himself — applying the common English of his day, whatever it was, in a concentrated, inspirited, but not in any case sublimated or quintessenced form, to such questions as enlisted, on one side or the other, his sound and shrewd if rather limited sense, his ready sympathy, his disgust at vice, and, most of all, his furious, though not in the least insane, denunciation of injustice and tyranny.

As it is, these qualities, clothed in the clearest, most vigorous, even within certain limits most pic- turesque, English, that had yet been applied to strictly prosaic purposes, apply themselves to sub- jects varied enough. There is the famous descrip- tion of his yeoman - father's life and livelihood; the grim repetition of the story of Cambyses flaying the

THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITEKATURE. 245

unjust judge, and covering the judgment -seat with his skin " to encourage the others " ; the consummate speech of "that diligent prelate and preacher the Devil," — that " busy ploughman " who has no time for "lording and loitering," but must be at his own business day and night. There are the constant references (in the same vein as More's on the other side, and natural enough) to the alarming economic changes of the time. " I think we shall be con- strained, if this continues, to pay for a pig a pound," says Latimer — which point had indeed been reached before 1900, and for a sucking-pig, too. There is the somewhat ominous attitude to kings — they are not to be stinted of money or power or honour, but they are to do what Latimer thinks just — the bitter denunciation of flatterers and bribers ; the vivid anec- dotage ; the amusing (though indeed it was then no laughing matter) intolerance of heresy when it is not his own heresy ; the quaint scraps and tags of Latin, that point the raciness of the English. There is no affectation ; but there is everywhere a rest- less glancing personality.

Latimer, however, though a most interesting and satisfactory individual, and to history a member of The translators an always interesting and sometimes sat- andhturguts. jgfactory class, is, as has been said, some- thing of an exception, and an exception of a kind not always historically of good omen. The danger of writing like Latimer's is seen to some extent in his own contemporaries; but to see it at its full we must go to the end of the seventeenth century.

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The " good plain " style, out of the hands of masters, is in constant danger of becoming a bad plain style — of being unkempt, colloquial, vulgar, if not of reach- ing positive slang — the "pozz," and the "upon rep," against which Swift protested in his famous Tatler article. At this precise moment, however, the danger, except in the necessarily ephemeral literature of controversy, was rather less than at another. Firstly, because the mere scholars had their classical point of honour before them, and, though they might be un - English or jejune, were not very likely to be slipshod. Secondly, because — by one of those half- mysterious bonnes fortunes of literature, those " wind- falls of the Muses," which do now and then occur — very exquisite models of style were being furnished, of a kind the most opposite to mere vernacularity, mere idiom, and yet thoroughly idiomatic and vernacular. And these models were made familiar, from youth to age, in the ears of even the most unliterary for mere hearing, and in those of the literary for imitation. They were provided to some extent (though to a less than by their consummate followers, the compilers of the Authorised Version, at the beginning of the next century) by the translators of the Bible — to a far greater extent, to an extent never yet surpassed, or even rivalled, by the editors of the English Prayer-book.

It is curious and provoking, though not really im- portant, that in the former case to some extent, in Puzzles of their the latter almost wholly, we are unable to work. identify the benefactors to whom we are

80 much indebted. The authorship of the un-

THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 247

equalled collects of the Prayer-book is pure guess- work, and the guess that attributes them mainly to Cranmer (1489-1556 ^) derives very faint corroboration from the Archbishop's certain work. Much Bible translation was avowedly done by joint -work; and even where there was a single author — as in the cases of Tyndale (1484-1536 i) and Coverdale (1487-1568) — a peculiar difficulty remains. It is in the circum- stances practically impossible that any translation of the Scriptures, unless it were made by the result of one of the fantastic experiments we read of — a man being educated to know Greek and Hebrew, but never to have heard of the Christian religion — could be first - hand. The most unbounded genius and the most unbounded conceit combined could not in the conditions sit down to "do" the Bible "out of its own head," and with no regard to predecessors. Even if prudence, reverence, and the desire to get the best version possible did not dictate study of these pre- decessors, importunate memory would insist on thrust- ing itself in, on recalling the Vulgate, and the partial and imperfect but widely spread vernacular transla- tions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As a matter of fact, all our Biblical translators seem to have availed themselves as far as possible of all their predecessors — an ever -lengthening train, — and it is pretty certain that Tyndale, in his New Testament, consulted not merely the Greek in the recension of

^ After reading the work of these and other Reformers carefully and consecutively, I have come to the conclusion that Coverdale haa most " magic of style," Cranmer much less, Tyndale hardly any.

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Erasmus, not merely the Vulgate, not merely Wyclif, but Luther's then new German version itself. The results of such a mosaic need not necessarily, but in most cases will, evade or overcome the individuality of the operator altogether.

Fortunately the literary quality of the Bible is so remarkable and so pervading that it suffices of itself Its ■nnsnn^asscd to colour and shape every version of it that lucrury quality, jg ^q^ ^^^jg ]jy ^^^ ^^gj. (juncc. The Small

amount of Hebrew which the present writer did actually learn at school has passed away from him too completely to make it possible for him to give any critical judgment of the merits of that language. But if it have not in itself qualities of greatness, then one may certainly find a Warburtonian argument of the most irresistible kind for its divine authorship, in the faculty which it has in making all the translations of it great literature. Of the Greek, and of that Vulgate which, half against their will, but to the great credit of tlieir intelligence, influenced the Iicnaissance translators only less than the four- teenth-century versions, one can speak more frankly. The above argument covers the Old Testament proper : whether the literature comes from the Hebrew or was put in by the Seventy, it is there. The more purely Greek books of the Apocrypha are still less open to question, because some of them at least we seem to have in the original. Wisdom and Ucclcsiasticiis, if they were as bad philosophy as Mr Tupper and as bad morals as some of Lucian, would remain great litera- ture— literature of all but the very first class, and

THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 249

sometimes of that. As for the New Testament, the purists cannot deprive the Gospels of narrative quali- ties of the most remarkable kind, or prevent the writings of St Paul from being rhetoric of all but tlie very best. Furthermore, the genius of St Jerome, and the peculiar charm of his, not indeed pure, but admirably literary, Latin, positively added a grace to the Vulgate itself, while missing very little of the graces of its originals. And in especial, there flowed in upon the modern vernaculars — none of them except Italian, upon which these translations exercised no influence, quite accom- plished in their own rhythms and style — a flood of strange exotic harmony, a volume of new vocabulary, and phrase, and idea, which could not fail to enrich, to train, to refine, and to vary them.

The results of these things are in the earlier transla- tions of the Bible less perfectly, as has been said, than in the later and practically final one.^ But they are there.

In the Prayer-hook they are complete. Here the hands of the compilers were freer ; but lest this should be a doubtful advantage, they were supplied with additional materials and models in the Breviary and the various local Uses; in the enormous body (some of it bad literature, and much indifferent, but some exquis- itely good) of devotional and concionatory Latin from Tertullian to h. Kempis ; and not least in the ineffable music of the Latin hymns. The result of it all, in the

' The "Revised Version" does not exist for literature; and the laity might surely be spared its frequently controversial alterations of sense and its generally hideous cacophonies of sound.

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Collects and Prayers as well as in the composition and arrangement of the different services, is generally acknowledged, and indeed is a standing marvel. We have admirable men of letters among the hierarchy of to-day ; but it is much if they manage by sedulous aping to write an occasional example in this kind which is inoffensive. The Prayer-book rhythm, that wonderful echoing accompaniment of pure sound (not mere suiting of sound to sense), is found in the Collects of the Burial Service, the simple but masterly rise and fall of the prayer of St Chrysostom, and of the second Collect at Evensong, the victorious trenchancy of the Athanasian Creed, the varied modulation of the Litany, the sustained and yet alluring stateliness of the Church Militant Prayer, the majesty of the first and general Collect for Advent, the cunning and multiform excel- lence of those for the Epiphany, for Quinquagesima, for Palm Sunday and Easter Eve, for the Fourth Sun- day after Easter, for Trinity Sunday, and for others too many to mention. After these achievements it could hardly be said that anything was impossible in English which required either suggestiveness of expression, or modulation of sound, or exquisiteness of individual phrase. All that was needed — and it was soon done, first by the poets of the end of the sixteenth, and then by the prose-writers as well as the poets of the seven- teenth century — was to extend to profane subjects the mere art of language, here so happily taught in refer- ence to sacred ones. What had been done for one order of thought could now be done for all, and all were kept in constant mind of it.

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But we have yet to speak of the group of Prose- writers who, towards the end of our period and just beyond it, but appertaining to us by the same rule which abstracted Berners and Fisher, made the centre of the sixteenth century one of the greatest turning- points in English prose. Their work, though in the hands of only one member of the school did it reach positive excellence as a part of English literature, was obviously conceived in common ; reflections of it ap- pear outside themselves ; and though it is in some respects too limited, and in one or two positively mis- taken, it has that characteristic of being "the right thing at the right time" which distinguishes all the favourites of fortune in history, whether it be political or literary, or of any other kind. This is the remark- able Cambridge group, the leaders of which were Cheke, Ascham, and Wilson.

The younger university had been less eager than the elder to receive the New Learning in the first instance ; The Cambridge the Vaudals — respecting whose planting at proie-men. Cambridge one of her chief nineteenth- century glories made an unkind gibe — still ruled tliere when the Greeks, through Grocyn and Linacre, More and Colet, had won Oxford. But amends, owing no doubt to the tradition of Erasmus's residence, though that residence was for the time ineffectual, were soon made. Both Cheke and Ascham " taught Cambridge Greek," and while the former also " taught King Edward," the latter performed the same office to King Edward's much more interesting sister and cousin, in regard to the language which has been directly and

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indirectly the teacher of literary greatness to all others. But the two, and their friend Thomas Wilson, took various ways of enforcing the doctrine which was common to them all — the doctrine that, great as were the classical languages, hopeless as it might be to try to equal them in the modern, yet it was tlie duty of every Englishman to make the best of English, and for that purpose to avail himself of the help of Greek and Latin, not as supplanters, but as assistants.

The importance of this, and also the eukairia — the " nick of time " — at which it came, require no volu- minous indication, though they have not always been appreciated as they deserve. For not mucli less than two centuries fresh stores of vocabulary had been con- stantly poured into the treasury of English prose by the custom of translation from Latin, French, and latterly Italian and Spanish. The practice, original as well as in translation, of a wider and ever wider range of subject, had at the same time provided the workman not merely with new material, but with new tools and methods. And latterly, at least in Fisher and Berners and the Biblical translators, definite rhetorical device had been discovered and employed. But all this had been done — as is common enough everywhere, but nowhere quite so common as in England — in a haphazard and generally unmethodical fashion. Nothing like standard English could be said to exist ; and between " aureateness " at one point of the circle, archaism at another, mere vernacularity at a third, and, all around, the tendency to regard Latin as the language in which an educated gentleman must

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write, there were dangers enough about. The men of whom we are now speaking set themselves to guard against these dangers — to put the national house in order in this respect as far as they could. They were not in even one instance men of genius ; only in Ascham's case could any one of them claim more than average literary talent. But this was rather fortunate than otherwise. Your genius does not usually do what is wanted on these occasions: he does usually either go off into eccentricities, or corrupt the world with one good but not universally applicable custom. What was wanted was a capable brigade of school- masters; and these men — who were actually school- masters, or at least teachers, by profession — had the better ethos of the schoolmaster as few have had. They saw literary English prose through its rudi- ments; they brought it about that the revolutionary extravagance of Euphuism in the next generation did good without doing much, if any, real harm ; and their lesson directly produced, though at Oxford, not at Cambridge, one of the greatest writers of English in Eichard Hooker.

As is always the case in these school -movements

when they are good for anything, the leaders did not

merely duplicate each other's function. Sir

Cheke.

John Cheke (1514-1557), though at least at one time the most prominent in station, was not much of a constructive man of letters, and was a good deal of a crotcheteer. Some of the crotchets he espoused were wandering truths, and gave offspring poiir le bon- heur du genre humain: some did not quite deserve

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that description, and were fortunately sterile as regards enduring progeny. It is to him that we owe that English pronunciation of Greek which has made per- haps more scholars appreciate the real beauty of Greek literature than any other nation can boast, whether it be or be not (which is extremely unimportant) near to the unknown original. And he has left us a striking pronouncement^ of the saving doctrine of the whole school on the importance of cultivating the vernacular. On the other hand, he tried to reform English spelling — a proceeding which, as spelling is a natural growth, is always absurd ; and he endeavoured to keep going that curious process of " Saxonising " Greek and Latin words, of which we find the most remarkable example seventy years earlier in Eeginald Pecock, and which is based upon a misconception of the real nature of the blended modern language. But nothing came of these things, and good came of the others.

Thomas (later Sir Thomas) Wilson, the second

member of the group ( ?-1587), was its chief

formalist. His Arte of Ehetorique, first published m loo3, but evidently written earlier, and reprinted with important additions ^ ten years later, is not indeed actually the first book of the title in English. The honour of having produced this belongs to one Leonard Cox, a Reading schoolmaster, and a friend of Erasmus, who had anticipated Wilson

^ In a letter to Sir Thomaa Hoby, published with Hoby's Courtier, and to be found reprinted in the Introduction to Mr Arber's edition of Aficham's Schoolmaster.

^ Both are rare. I possess the latter, which ought to be reprinted.

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by twenty-one years. But Cox's book is a mere tech- nical abstract of scholastic-traditional dealings with the Art. Wilson's is a real application of it to English.

The little quarto — first of all English books to deal systematically with the means and methods of English His Art of literature — has a dedication to Northumber- Rhetoric. land (at the time Earl of Warwick only), with the usual flattery (the book is to be put to school to Dudley, he is so great an orator) ; a pro- logue to the Header, with some interesting facts on the book's and the author's history ; a preface on the divinity of Eloquence — God-given, lost by man, and recovered by the Giver's help ; a couple of copies of Latin Elegiacs — by the prolific Dr Haddon to the author, and by the author to his book ; 113 leaves of text, and a very methodical and elaborate Index. At first, though he never confines himself to them very slavishly, Wilson seems to be mainly observing the lines and repeating the system of the Latin Rhetorics, which (themselves altered but little from the earlier Greek treatises of Hermagoras, Hermogenes, and others) had for more than a thousand years been chief among school - books. The early direction of the matter to the " persuasion " of the hearer, the later more than half - legal absorption in status and similar things, make full appearance. And though Wilson's examples take a wide range, and he is evidently at least endeavouring to be as a rule philosophical rather than merely jurisprudential, it is probable that the expense of time and pains, then

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almost necessary on these things, has helped to deprive the book of what it ought to have had long ago — a new edition, with proper editorial apparatus. But the efforts to modernise and vitalise are, even in these parts, constant. As instances of a certain kind of Amplification, he contrives to pay compliments to two of his friends, Latimer and the above-mentioned Dr Haddon — representing the one as the father of all Preachers, the other as the best Latin writer in England. Not only Jack Straw, but the recent Norfolk rebel Kett, comes in for mention as an example, with the Siege of Boulogne and the Battle of " Muskel-borowe " (Pinkie). The curious taste of the day for waggery — sometimes, like that of all days, not so waggish to posterity — comes out frequently, with the inevitable tendency of all good Protestants to make the Church of Konie defray the expenses of the jest if possible. In fact, the Division of " Pleasant Behaviour " occupies ten folios, or twenty full pages, towards the end of the Second Book. The Third, according to precedent im- memorial, at least from Aristotle downward, is devoted to the really literary part of the matter. And it is in the exordium of this that we find those passages which have always been regarded by good judges as giving Wilson no mean place in the story of English liter- ature. Discussing the arts of Elocution, he strikes at once and repeatedly at Outlandish-English, French- English, English Italianated, pedantic technicalities, Archaism (" The fine courtier will talk nothing but Chaucer"), and, lastly, the extravagant "aureation" or Latinising which had been the curse of the fifteenth

THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. 257

century. To exemplify this latter he gives a letter from a Lincolnshire gentleman, which is pretty certainly imitated from the Limousin scholar in Eabelais, or perhaps from the original thereof in Geoffrey Tory; following this up with another example of sheer Malapropism, which he avouches to have been ad- dressed to the Provost of King's during his own Cambridge days ("you are a worshipful Pilate," "keeps an abominable house," &c.) He turns from this jest-earnest to the usual business of Figures and the like, and pursues his task once more on the old lines, descending even to gesture and the like. But he never forgets the vernacular ; and close to the end of the book he gives us an example, under the head of Pronunciation, of that glossing and slurring which has always been characteristic of English in England, by telling us that some called " black velvet " " black vellet."

This constant bringing of matters home to the mother-tongue is one of the main notanda in Wilson ;

" Ink-horn another is the aversion to " ink-horn terms."

terms." This, in its own way and division, almost famous phrase and obvious metaphor — as though the ambitious composers could not be satisfied with the surface of the receptacle, but must dive into its depths for strange dregs and lees of speech — became fashion- able, and is pointedly referred to by contemporaries. It is of great importance for our purpose.

To a very small extent, no doubt, it reflects that classical distrust and almost horror of the inusitatum verhum which was certain to become fashionable among

B

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the Humanists of the Renaissance. But to regard it as reflecting this only would be a very gross error. As has just been said, the great curse of style, especially prose style, in France, and in England (which in literary matters so closely followed France) during the fifteenth century, had been the mania for aureate and rhetorical tricks. But this mania had been rendered still more dangerous by the popularity of the triplet. "Whether Wilson in his Lincolnshire squire's letter is glancing at Fisher, who was not popular with the extreme Protes- tant party, it is difficult to say ; but he certainly puts a triplet in the forefront of the composition. And, whether in triplet or in couplet or alone, the " ink-horn term " was certainly then only too much in evidence. It was therefore of real importance to eliminate it, if possible, in any process of arranging and constituting the English tongue for the general purposes of liter- ature— of as much consequence almost as to expel mere solecisms and barbarisms. Nor is the objection to the courtier's Chaucerisms less noteworthy. These excellent scholars were, on the whole, much less sound on English verse than on English prose, and it was in their midst, it would seem, that the most pestilent of all monsters, the English hexameter, was fostered. They could not regard with any affection such a formid- able champion of English verse proper as Chaucer. Besides, the somewhat priggish and prudish morality which characterised the Protestant party was no doubt scandalised by him. Yet it is fair to remember that there was at the time something to be said for them. Chaucer's language, delightful as it is, was not fitted,

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and would not have sufficed, for the general purposes of English, especially of English prose, at this date ; and its popularity necessarily served to postpone the settlement of English pronunciation. Now it can do us no harm, and does us an infinite amount of good. Then it would have been rather terrible if England had gone back to the superfluous e, with its sixteen ^ different grammatical possibilities of value.

But the third of the group is by far the most im- portant in his influence (an influence working mostly for good, but also a little for ill) upon

Asehaw..

English literature. Roger Ascham (1515- 1568), though by no means a pedant, was a pedagogue born ; but he must have had also no small powers of literary creation. Not merely his two substantive works,^ the earlier Toxophilus (1545) and the later Schoolmaster (1570), but the not inconsiderable body of his Letters, show this beyond all doubt. Some have tried to find in Ascham such a restless and multifold working of the yeasty spirit which often shows itself in men of parts just before a great literary period, that they have even regarded him as a follower of Berners and a predecessor of Lyly in the genesis of Euphuism. But it is quite certain that, by example as well as by precept, Ascham was strenuous in the practice of the literary vernacular, and untiring in his endeavour to

^ I do not pledge myself to sixteen, which I extract — though the enumeration is not there — from Drs Morris and Skeat's Introduction to the Prologue. Fourteen or fifteen — nay, four or five — would do to show that "'twas time for it to go."

' Both reprinted by Mr Arber. Of the whole works the best edition is that of GDes, 3 vols, in 4 (London, 1864-65).

260 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

raise it to higher powers by the imitation and inspir- ation of the classics. In his almost youthful Toxo- philus he elects boldly to " write this English matter in the English tongue for English men," though it would have been so much easier for him to have written it in Latin. In the collection of his Letters we see him gradually, and no doubt gladly, exchanging the universal language of Humanism — almost of Europe — for the struggling, and to foreigners half- barbarous, vernacular of England. In the posthumous Schoolmaster, anxious as he is to perfect the teaching of the learned languages, he is at least equally anxious to perfect it through, and so as in turn to perfect, the vernacular itself.

Even his literary sins — or, if that be too harsh a word, peccadilloes — are only the effect of misguided patriotism. There is no doubt that he favoured the classical metres, and that his doing so is proof among others, to which we shall come soon, of his want of the sense of poetry. But Spenser was scarcely destitute of that sense, and he was saved, only so as by fire, from the composition of trimeters and hexameters, whose harmony is that of the salt-box and the cleaver. And there are other excuses for Ascham. In his young days a man could, even if he hungered and thirsted for poetry, find very little to satisfy him in any contemporary English. Chaucer was archaic, and Ascham's school, as we have said, was bent on the future, not the past. Since Chaucer's time until the new Italianated efforts of the young courtiers — which Ascham doubtless thought frivolous

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xenomania — the range of English verse was simply a desert. Of the poets who existed while he was himself young, Hawes would ofi'end his classical taste from one side as Skelton from another, and Barclay could satisfy him from none. Meanwhile half Europe was going astray on this curious by-path of classical metre, and why not England ?

So also Ascham's prudery and Puritanism were only patriotism a little gone wrong. It is very horrible to us to read his Philistine judgment of the Mo7ie d' Arthur, and we know that Italy and France, especially the former, had at this moment an almost infinite amount to teach England. But they had also, and again especially Italy, a great deal to teach England which Ascham might be justly eager that England should not learn. It is to be feared, from his judgment of Malory, that even if he could have glanced at "that Elvish Queene," of which, not impossibly, a poor scholar of his own university dreamt just after Ascham's own death, he would not have cared for it : it is quite certain that in Ariosto himself many things must have left Ascham un- moved, and some have moved him to nothing but indignant testifying. The latest editor of Painter's Palace of Pleasure, Mr Jacobs, thinks that there is direct reference in the Schoolmaster to that Collection ; but whether this is so or not, Ascham's wide reading and travel must have made the Italian novella and the French nouvelle perfectly familiar to him. And we know well what he must have thought not merely of the "blasphemy and bawdry," to use the terms

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which he might as justly have applied here as he applies them unjustly to Malory, but of the detest- able cruelty and savagery which is unknown in the romances. As for the Capitoli and suchlike things, it needed no Puritan to deprecate their introduction. Ascham, a man, like most of the best of his contem- poraries, thoroughly penetrated with the Plutarchian ideal of education — in which moral, spiritual, and bodily health is the one thing needful, though learn- ing is a desirable addition — could not, being what he was, have held different ideas on these points.

But all his ideas were harnessed to one single chariot, the determination to make England, and Englishmen, and English things, but especially the English tongue, a little better when he left them than as he found them. He succeeded. His own stamp of prose, short as it comes of universal validity, is admirable in the plainer kind. It needed only a genius like Hooker's to make it more admirable still in its merits, and an eccentric talent like Lyly's to instigate men to work themselves free of its weaknesses. For sureness, vivid- ness, correctness, command of method, no forerunner had equalled him. In the Toxophilus, the pleasant whimsical vindication of shooting from the charge of taking up too much time, the admirable argument for the union of Great Britain, the exact but nothing dull description of the implements, and the masterly sketch of the winter ride from Topcliffe to Boroughbridge — in the Schoolvmster, passage after passage of shrewd sense and sound learning, could be cited to prove the truth of this encomium in prose. And as for verse, those

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contemporaries, of whom he may have known (and perhaps thought) not very much, had already, long before his death, set English on a better way even than his own.

Undoubtedly, however, the literary work of the period is work which was not printed till the period itself was in strictness over, but which had been composed in its youngest examples at least ten, in its eldest perhaps more than thirty, years before that actual publication in 1557.

This is, of course, the work contributed posthumously and unintentionally by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) ^, .,. ,and the Earl of Surrey (1517 ?-1547) to

The position and

ville 01 the period between Tottel itself and the Shepherd's Calendar — Googe and Churchyard, Turberville and Gascoigne, and the contributors, with rare exception, to the miscellanies which followed Tottel — are positively interesting when we think of the trifling interval between them and the glories of the later years of Elizabeth. We may even, with- some advantage, mention two writers as instances of this curious " darkness before dawn," and discuss one

278 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — EARLIER RENAISSANCE.

of them briefly. It is, of course, perfectly true that Thomas Tusser (1525 ?-1580) in his Hundred (after- T-usser and wards Fivc Hvjidred) Points of Husbandry ^ Heywood. wrotc directly with the purpose of Instruc- tion, and addressed probably the least literary class in the kingdom. But he himself was a man of education ; he had the tongues (as he tells us rue- fully) well whipped into him by Udall; and the extreme variety of metre which he attempts shows at least some poetical ambition. John Heywood (1497 ?-1580 ?) ^ also addressed a popular audience ; but the pains and ingenuity with which he has woven his "proverbs" into the text of something like a rough novel, or continuous satiric /aJ/mw, would have been wasted on the merely illiterate, and his Epigrams are at least a flight at classical butts. He was, more- over, a court poet, had (as his Interludes, v. chap, vi., show better than his poems) a very shrewd wit, and was not in the least a mere caterer for the sixteenth- century equivalent of Seven Dials. But the doggerel of Tusser is almost proverbial — one may think it a little exaggerated when one comes to read the book through, but still it is doggerel. And in Heywood not merely a certain bluntness and commonness of thought, but a constant inability to give even to that blunt aud common thought adequate expression, be- trays itself. That there is a vein of utter Philistinism

^ In the shorter form it appeared in the same year as Tottel. Of the whole I use the edition of Mavor, 4to (London, 1814). That of the English Dialect Society (1878) is more heedful of modem require- ments and scholarship.

' Proverbs and Epigrams, ed. Spenser Society {s.L, 1867).

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in the Anglo-Saxon temperament the most patriotic and pure-blooded Englishman must admit; but it has never, not even in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, betrayed itself so distinctly as at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth. The blame is usually put on the Devil- take-the-hindmost tendency, the selfishness and the hardness implanted in men by a long and ruthless civil war : and it may rest there or it may not. But the fact is certain. Coarseness of language (Heywood is by no means licentious, but intensely coarse); constant harping on the pravity of women and the miseries of the marriage state, not after the skirmish- ing mediaeval fashion, but with a kind of dogged animosity ; the presentation of mankind as practically divided between reckless spendthrifts, impudent beggars, and close-fisted curmudgeons; a morality and theory of conduct not lacking in shrewdness or unbased on experience, but low and hard; — these things give the tone of the Proverbs and the Epigrams The Proverbs alike. The expression of this tone in the and Epigrams. Provcrbs may escape criticism here because the fantastic and laborious mosaic of popular sayings in their actual words, which forms the bulk of the text, relieves the writer of all but the responsibility of selection ; with the Epigrams it is different. That the "mad merry wit," which the author represents as generally attributed to him, too often seems to moderns not to get much beyond want of sense in its madness, and to stop woefully short in its attempt at merriment, is not necessarily fatal. It is just

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possible that our most admired humourists at the junction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries might not have stirred the muscles of Heywood's con- temporaries very convulsively. But we are less in danger of mistake in reference to the phrasing. Hey- wood can sometimes attain to a tolerable antithesis, as in the actual adage which Lady Macbeth has made in a sense immortal —

" The cat would eat fish, but she will not wet her feet : She thinketh flesh with dry feet more sweet than fish with weet." 1

But this is comparatively rudimentary, and beyond it Heywood has no epigrammatic turn of words except a rather infantine punning. Perhaps the best turned of all his epigrams is the sombre comment on one of the old " Hendyng " proverbs : —

" When bale is hext [highest] boot is next : though boot be

nigh. What helpeth boot where bale is ever most high 1 "

But, as a rule, he proceeds little beyond the " You're another" method of childhood or the simplest par- onomasia.

These are the familiar signs of a language that is " not ready " ; that has slipped into disorganisation and has not yet reorganised itself. Great passion will now and then restore effective articulation to such a language ; elaborate literary forms will give it

^ The pronunciation was evidently as the spelling : for it would have cost Heywood nothing to write

"Than fish with wet more sweet."

THE SCHOOL OF ELIZABETHAN LITEKATURE. 281

a kind of artificial voice. But familiar, and especially facetiously familiar, composition requires much more accomplishment. And of this accomplishment there is little sign in English during our present period. But it was working hard, trying many experiments, and specially betaking itself — as we have seen and shall see later — to the critical study and exercise of the English tongue: and the next generation reaped an ample harvest of these pains.

When it is remembered that Dunbar himself certainly lived during not a little, and Douglas during much more, of our period, although these and Lyndsay have for sufficient reasons been dealt with in the preceding volume, it may seem strange that scarcely a paragraph should be needed for the special literature of Scotland in this chapter. Yet no just comparative view could allow more. The famous Complaint of Scotland (1549)^ is almost the earliest important piece of even partly original Scots prose ; and its originality disappears the more it is examined, while its interest is almost limited to the accidental citations of popular literature which it contains. With Lyndsay himself the striking but short-lived succession of Scots poets ceases — to be continued only by the sometimes lively, if virulent and indecorous, Eeformation lampoons,^ the very good and godly but rather dull hymns and spiritual songs which represent the more serious side of the same movement,^ the work, not unattractive in

1 Ed. Murray, E.E.T.S. (London, 1872-73).

2 Ed. Cranstoun, S.T.S. (Edinburgh, 1889-93).

3 Ed. Mitchell, S.T.S. (Edinburgh, 1897).

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quality but very scanty in amount, of Alexander Scott ^ in Queen Mary's time, and that — not quite so attractive, though a little larger — of Alexander Mont- gomerie,^ so far on in her son's that it almost belongs to the next volume but one. Of the two protagonists of the Eeformation with the pen, Buchanan has been dealt with already, and Knox requires little dealing. His famous First Blast of the Trumpet against the MoTistrous Regiment of Women^ is a vigorous and correct piece of writing, in a style not so advanced as Ascham's; with the rest of his work the present writer has no exhaustive acquaintance. The History of the Reformation contains both description and nar- ration of merit, but has been overpraised sometimes. Ninian Winzet,* the best of the writers on the other side, is Knox's inferior both in style and in force ; and we need not stray into consideration of things like Gau's Richt Vay,^ which are only translations.

The main interest, indeed, of this period of Scottish literature lies in two connected symptoms of decay — the continuance of the merely mediaeval character, and the failure to find, even for this, any new dress of style, that shall be the style, not of a dialect, but of a language. The English accomplishment itself is not, as we have seen, great ; but in most English writers there is stir, search, unrest, preparation, schooling. In

1 Ed. Cranstoun, S.T.S. (Edinburgh, 1896).

2 Ed. Cranstoun, S.T.S. (Edinburgh, 1887).

3 Ed. Arber (London, 1878). The standard for Knox as a whole is the edition of Laing, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1846-64).