ROMANTIC ELEMENTS IN ITALIAN CRITICISM

In the Italian critical literature of the sixteenth century there are to be found the germs of romantic as well as classical criticism. The development of romanticism in Renaissance criticism is due to various tendencies, of ancient, of mediÆval, and of modern origin. The ancient element is Platonism; the mediÆval elements are Christianity, and the influence of the literary forms and the literary subject-matter of the Middle Ages; and the modern elements are the growth of national life and national literatures, and the opposition of modern philosophy to Aristotelianism.

I. The Ancient Romantic Element

As the element of reason is the predominant feature of neo-classicism, so the element of imagination is the predominant feature of romanticism; and according as the reason or the imagination predominates in Renaissance literature, there results neo-classicism or romanticism, while the most perfect art finds a reconciliation of both elements in the imaginative reason. According to the faculty of reason, when made the basis of literature, the poet is, as it were, held down to earth, and art becomes the mere reasoned expression of the truth of life. By the faculty of imagination, the poet is made to create a new world of his own,—a world in which his genius is free to mould whatever its imagination takes hold of. This romantic doctrine of the freedom of genius, of inspiration and the power of imagination, in so far as it forms a part of Renaissance criticism, owes its origin to Platonism. The influence of the Platonic doctrines among the humanists has already been alluded to. Plato was regarded by them as their leader in the struggle against mediÆvalism, scholasticism, and Aristotelianism. The Aristotelian dialectic of the Middle Ages appealed exclusively to the reason; Platonism gave opportunities for the imagination to soar to vague and sublime heights, and harmonize with the divine mysteries of the universe. As regards poetry and imaginative literature in general, the critics of the Renaissance appealed from the Plato of the Republic and the Laws to the Plato of the Ion, the PhÆdrus, and the Symposium. Beauty being the subject-matter of art, Plato's praise of beauty was transferred by the Renaissance to poetry, and his praise of the philosopher was transferred to the poet.

The Aristotelian doctrine defines beauty according to its relations to the external world; that is, poetry is an imitation of nature, expressed in general terms. The Platonic doctrine, on the contrary, is concerned with poetry, or beauty, in so far as it concerns the poet's own nature; that is, the poet is divinely inspired and is a creator like God. Fracastoro, as has been seen, makes the Platonic rapture, the delight in the true and essential beauty of things, the true tests of poetic power. In introducing this Platonic ideal of poetic beauty into modern literary criticism, he defines and distinguishes poetry according to a subjective criterion; and it is according to whether the objective or the subjective conception of art is insisted upon, that we have the classic spirit or the romantic spirit. The extreme romanticists, like the Schlegels and their contemporaries in Germany, entirely eliminate the relation of poetry to the external world, and in this extreme form romanticism becomes identified with the exaggerated subjective idealism of Fichte and Schelling. The extreme classicists entirely eliminate the poet's personality; that is, poetry is merely reasoned expression, a perfected expression of what all men can see in nature, for the poet has no more insight into life—no more imagination—than any ordinary, judicious person.

The effects of this Platonic element upon Renaissance criticism were various. In the first place, it was through the Platonic influence that the relation of beauty to poetry was first made prominent.[298] According to Scaliger, Tasso, Sidney, another world of beauty is created by the poet,—a world that possesses beauty in its perfection as this world never can. The reason alone leaves no place for beauty; and accordingly, for the neo-classicists, art was ultimately restricted to moral and psychological observation. Moreover, Platonism raised the question of the freedom of genius and of the imagination. Of all men, only the poet, as Sidney and others pointed out, is bound down and restricted by no laws. But if poetry is a matter of inspiration, how can it be called an art? If genius alone suffices, what need is there of study and artifice? For the extreme romanticists of this period, genius alone was accounted sufficient to produce the greatest works of poetry; for the extreme classicists, studious and labored art unaided by genius fulfilled all the functions of poetic creation; but most of the critics of the sixteenth century seem to have agreed with Horace that genius, or an inborn aptitude, is necessary to begin with, but that it needs art and study to regulate and perfect it. Genius cannot suffice without restraint and cultivation.

Scaliger, curiously, reconciles both classic and romantic elements. The poet, according to Scaliger, is inspired, is in fact a creator like God; but poetry is an imitation (that is, re-creation) of nature, according to certain fixed rules obtained from the observation of the anterior expression of nature in great art. It is these rules that make poetry an art; and these rules form a distinct neo-classic element imposed on the Aristotelian doctrine.

II. MediÆval Elements

The Middle Ages contributed to the poetic ideal of the Renaissance two elements: romantic themes and the Christian spirit. The forms and subjects of mediÆval literature are distinctly romantic. Dante's Divine Comedy is an allegorical vision; it is almost unique in form, and has no classical prototype.[299] The tendency of Petrarchism was also in the direction of romanticism. Its "conceits" and its subjectivity led to an unclassical extravagance of thought and expression; and the Petrarchistic influence made lyric poetry, and accordingly the criticism of lyric poetry, more romantic than any other form of literature or literary criticism during the period of classicism. It was for this reason that there was little lyricism in the classical period, not only in France, but wherever the classic temper predominated. The themes of the romanzi are also mediÆval and romantic; but while they are mediÆval contributions to literature,[300] they became contributions to literary criticism only after the growth of national life and the development of the feeling of nationality, both distinctly modern.

Some reference has already been made to the paganization of culture by the humanists. But with the growth of that revival of Christian sentiment which led to the Reformation, there were numerous attempts to reconcile Christianity with pagan culture.[301] Such men as Ficino and Pico della Mirandola attempted to harmonize Christianity and Platonic philosophy; and under the great patron of letters, Pope Leo X., there were various attempts to harmonize Christianity with the classic spirit in literature. In such poems as Vida's Christiad and Sannazaro's De Partu Virginis, Christianity is covered with the drapery of paganism or classicism.

The first reaction against this paganization of culture was, as has been seen, effected by Savonarola. This reaction was reËnforced, in the next century, by the influence and authority of the Council of Trent; and after the middle of the sixteenth century the Christian ideal plays a prominent part in literary criticism. The spirit of both Giraldi Cintio and Minturno is distinctly Christian. For Giraldi the romanzi are Christian, and hence superior to the classical epics. He allows the introduction of pagan deities only into epics dealing with the ancient classical subjects; but Tasso goes further, and says that no modern heroic poet should have anything to do with them. According to Tasso, the heroes of an heroic poem must be Christian knights, and the poem itself must deal with a true, not a false, religion. The subject is not to be connected with any article of Christian faith or dogma, because that was fixed by the Council of Trent; but paganism in any form is altogether unfit for a modern epic. Tasso even goes so far as to assert that piety shall be numbered among the virtues of the knightly heroes of epic poetry. At the same time also, Lorenzo Gambara wrote his work, De Perfecta Poeseos Ratione, to prove that it is essential for every poet to exclude from his poems, not only everything that is wicked or obscene, but also everything that is fabulous or that deals with pagan divinities.[302] It was to this religious reaction that we owe the Christian poetry of Tasso, Du Bartas, and Spenser. But humanism was strong, and rationalism was rife; and the religious revival was hardly more than temporary. Neo-classicism throughout Europe was essentially pagan.

III. Modern Elements

The literature of the Middle Ages constitutes, as it were, one vast body of European literature; only with the Renaissance did distinctly national literatures spring into existence. Nationalism as well as individualism was subsequent to the Renaissance; and it was at this period that the growth of a national literature, of national life,—in a word, patriotism in its widest sense,—was first effected.

The linguistic discussions and controversies of the sixteenth century prepared the way for a higher appreciation of national languages and literatures. These controversies on the comparative merits of the classical and vernacular tongues had begun in the time of Dante, and were continued in the sixteenth century by Bembo, Castiglione, Varchi, Muzio, Tolomei, and many others; and in 1564 Salviati summed up the Italian side of the question in an oration in which he asserted that the Tuscan, or, as he called it, the Florentine language and the Florentine literature are vastly superior to any other language or literature, whether ancient or modern. However extravagant this claim may appear, the mere fact that Salviati made such a claim at all is enough to give him a place worthy of serious consideration in the history of Italian literature. The other side of the controversy finds its extremest expression in a treatise of Celio Calcagnini addressed to Giraldi Cintio, in which the hope is expressed that the Italian language, and all the literature composed in that language, would be absolutely abandoned by the world.[303]

In Giraldi Cintio we find the first traces of purely national criticism. His purpose, in writing the discourse on the romanzi, was primarily to defend Ariosto, whom he had known personally in his youth. The point of view from which he starts is that the romanzi constitute a new form of poetry of which Aristotle did not know, and to which, therefore, Aristotle's rules do not apply. Giraldi regarded the romantic poems of Ariosto and Boiardo both as national and as Christian works; and Italian literature is thus for the first time critically distinguished from classical literature in regard to language, religion, and nationality. In Giraldi's discourse there is no apparent desire either to underrate or to disregard the Poetics of Aristotle; the fact was simply that Aristotle had not known the poems which deal with many actions of many men, and hence it would be absurd to demand that such poems should conform to his rules. The romanzi deal with phases of poetry, and phases of life, which Aristotle could not be expected to understand.

A similar feeling of the distinct nationality of Italian literature is to be found in many of the prefaces of the Italian comedies of this period. Il Lasca, in the preface of the Strega (c. 1555), says that "Aristotle and Horace knew their own times, but ours are not the same at all. We have other manners, another religion, and another mode of life; and it is therefore necessary to make comedies after a different fashion." As early as 1534, Aretino, in the prologue of his Cortegiana, warned his audience "not to be astonished if the comic style is not observed in the manner required, for we live after a different fashion in modern Rome than they did in ancient Athens." Similarly, Gelli, in the dedication of the Sporta (1543), justifies the use of language not to be found in the great sources of Italian speech, on the ground that "language, together with all other natural things, continually varies and changes."[304]

Although there is in Giraldi Cintio no fundamental opposition to Aristotle, it is in his discourse on the romanzi that there may be found the first attempt to wrest a province of art from Aristotle's supreme authority. Neither Salviati, who had rated the Italian language above all others, nor Calcagnini, who had regarded it as the meanest of all, had understood the discussion of the importance of the Tuscan tongue to be concerned with the question of Aristotle's literary supremacy. It was simply a national question—a question as to the national limits of Aristotle's authority, just as was the case in the several controversies connected with Tasso, Dante, and Guarini's Pastor Fido.[305] Castelvetro, in his commentary on the Poetics, differs from Aristotle on many occasions, and does not hesitate even to refute him. Yet his reverence for Aristotle is great; his sense of Aristotle's supreme authority is strong; and on one occasion, where Horace, Quintilian, and Cicero seem to differ from Aristotle, Castelvetro does not hesitate to assert that they could not have seen the passage of the Poetics in question, and that, in fact, they did not thoroughly understand the true constitution of a poet.[306]

The opposition to Aristotelianism among the humanists has already been alluded to. This opposition increased more and more with the development of modern philosophy. In 1536 Ramus had attacked Aristotle's authority at Paris. A few years later, in 1543, Ortensio Landi, who had been at the Court of France for some time, published his Paradossi, in which it is contended that the works which pass under the name of Aristotle are not really Aristotle's at all, and that Aristotle himself was not only an ignoramus, but also the most villanous man of his age. "We have, of our own accord," he says, "placed our necks under the yoke, putting that vile beast of an Aristotle on a throne, and depending on his conclusions as if he were an oracle."[307] It is the philosophical authority of Aristotle that Landi is attacking. His attitude is not that of a humanist, for Cicero and Boccaccio do not receive more respectful treatment at his hands than Aristotle does. Landi, despite his mere eccentricities, represents the growth of modern free thought and the antagonism of modern philosophy to Aristotelianism.

The literary opposition and the philosophical opposition to Aristotelianism may be said to meet in Francesco Patrizzi, and, in a less degree, in Giordano Bruno. Patrizzi's bitter Antiperipateticism is to be seen in his Nova de Universis Philosophia (1591), in which the doctrines of Aristotle are shown to be false, inconsistent, and even opposed to the doctrines of the Catholic Church. His literary antagonism to Aristotle is shown in his remarkable work, Della Poetica, published at Ferrara in 1586. This work is divided into two parts,—the first historical, La Deca Istoriale, and the second controversial, La Deca Disputata. In the historical section he attempts to derive the norm of the different poetic forms, not from one or two great works as Aristotle had done, but from the whole history of literature. It is thus the first work in modern times to attempt the philosophical study of literary history, and to trace out the evolution of literary forms. The second or controversial section is directed against the Poetics of Aristotle, and in part also against the critical doctrines of Torquato Tasso. In this portion of his work Patrizzi sets out to demonstrate—per istoria, e per ragioni, e per autoritÀ de' grandi antichi—that the accepted critical opinions of his time were without foundation; and the Poetics of Aristotle himself he exhibits as obscure, inconsistent, and entirely unworthy of credence.

Similar antagonism to the critical doctrines of Aristotle is to be found in passages scattered here and there throughout the works of Giordano Bruno. In the first dialogue of the Eroici Furori, published at London in 1585, while Bruno was visiting England, he expresses his contempt for the mere pedants who judge poets by the rules of Aristotle's Poetics. His contention is that there are as many sorts of poets as there are human sentiments and ideas, and that poets, so far from being subservient to rules, are themselves really the authors of all critical dogma. Those who attack the great poets whose works do not accord with the rules of Aristotle are called by Bruno stupid pedants and beasts. The gist of his argument may be gathered from the following passage:—

A similar antagonism to Aristotle and a similar literary individualism are to be found in a much later work by Benedetto Fioretti, who under the pseudonym of Udeno Nisieli published the five volumes of his Proginnasmi Poetici between 1620 and 1639.[309] Just before the close of the sixteenth century, however, the Poetics had obtained an ardent defender against such attacks in the person of Francesco Buonamici, in his Discorsi Poetici; and three years later, in 1600, Faustino Summo published a similar defence of Aristotle. The attacks on Aristotle's literary dictatorship were of little avail; it was hardly necessary even to defend him. For two centuries to come he was to reign supreme on the continent of Europe; and in Italy this supremacy was hardly disturbed until the days of Goldoni and Metastasio.top

[298] De Sanctis, ii. 193 sq.