limit of one day. On this last point the critics of the sixteenth century accorded six, eight, or twelve hours according to individual taste or humour: some of them (amongst them Segni) allowed twenty-four hours, including the night as particularly propitious to assassinations and the other acts of violence which usually form the plot of tragedies; others extended the limit to thirtysix or forty-eight hours. The last, and most curious, unity, that of place, was slowly developed by Castelvetro, Riccoboni and Scaliger until the Frenchman Jean de la Taille joined it as a third to the existing two in 1572, and in 1598 Angelo Ingegneri finally formulated it more explicitly.

rules.

The Italian treatises were widely read and regarded Poetics of the as authoritative all over Europe, and awakened the first kinds and effort towards a learned theory of poetry in France, Spain. Scaliger. England and Germany. A good representative of his class is Julius Cæsar Scaliger, who has been considered, with some exaggeration, as the true founder of French pseudo-classicism or neo-classicism; as one who (it has been said) "laid the first stone of the classical Bastille." But if he was neither the first nor the only one, he certainly helped greatly to reduce "to a system of doctrines the principal consequences of the sovranty of Reason in works of literature," with his minute distinctions and classifications of kinds, the insurmountable barriers he erected between them, and his distrust of free inspiration and imagination.1 Scaliger numbers among his descendants (beside Daniel Heinsius) d'Aubignac, Rapin, Dacier and other tyrants of French literature and drama: Boileau turned the rules of neo-classicism into neat verses. It has been noticed that Lessing entered the same field; Lessing. his opposition to the French rules (which was an opposition of rule to rule, in which he had been forestalled by Italian writers, for example by Calepio in 1732) is anything but radical. Lessing maintained that Corneille and other authors had misinterpreted Aristotle, to whose laws even the Shakespearian drama could be shown to con1 Lintilhac, Un Coup d'État, etc., p. 543.

Compromises and

extensions.

form; but on the other hand he strongly opposed the abolition of all rules and those who shouted "genius, genius," placing genius above the law and saying that genius makes the law. For the very reason that genius is law, replied Lessing, laws have their value and can be determined negation of them would entail the confinement of genius to its first trial flights, making example or practice useless.2

But the "kinds" and their "limits" could be maintained for centuries solely by means of infinitely subtle interpretations, analogical extensions and more or less concealed compromises. The Italian Renaissance critics, while working at their Poetics in the style of Aristotle, found themselves confronted with chivalric poetry, and had to make the best of it; this they did by assigning it to a kind of poem not foreseen by antiquity (Giraldi Cintio). Here and there indeed a rigorist was heard protesting that romances were in no way different from heroic poetry, and were only "badly written heroics" (Salviati). And since it was impossible to deny a place in Italian literature to Dante's poem, Iacopo Mazzoni, in his Defence of Dante, overhauled once more the categories of Poetics in order to find a niche for the sacred poem. Farces made their appearance at this time, and Cecchi (1585) declares "Farce is a third novelty, occupying a place between tragedy and comedy "5 The Pastor fido of Guarini was published, neither tragedy nor comedy, but tragicomedy; and discovering no heading among the kinds deduced from moral or civil philosophy suitable for the intruder, Jason de Nores proceeded to rule it out of existence; Guarini made a valiant defence and claimed special protection for his beloved Pastor under a third, or mixed, style, representative of real life. Another

1 Hamburg. Dramat. Nos. 81, 101-104. 2 Op. cit. Nos. 96, 101-104. 3 G. B. Giraldi Cintio, De' romanzi, delle comedie e delle tragedie, 1554 (ed. Daelli, 1864).

• Iacopo Mazzoni, Difesa della commedia di Dante, Cesena, 1587.

G. M. Cecchi, prologue to Romanesca, 1585.

• Cf. besides the two Veratti, the Compendio della poesia tragicomica, Venice, 1601.

2

a

rigorist, Fioretti (Udeno Nisieli) proclaimed the poem poetic monster, so huge and deformed that centaurs, hippogriffs and chimæras are comparatively graceful and charming fit to bring a blush to the cheek of the muse, a disgrace to poetry, a mixture of ingredients in themselves discordant, inimical and incompatible";1 but will this bluster drive the delicious Pastor fido from the hands of lovers of poetry? The same thing occurred in the case of Marino's Adone, described by Chapelain as a poem of peace" for want of a better definition, though other supporters called it "a new form of epic poem "; and the same thing happened again in the case of the comedy of art and musical drama. Corneille, who had called down a furious tempest from Scudéry and the Academicians on the head of his Cid, remarked in his discourse on Tragedy, though basing his position on that of Aristotle, that there was necessity for "quelque modération, quelque favorable interprétation, pour n'être pas obligés de condamner beaucoup de poèmes, que nous avons vu réussir sur nos théâtres." 'Il est aisé de nous accommoder avec Aristote . . . "3 he says in another place: a piece of literary hypocrisy which startles by its verbal resemblance to "les accommodements avec le Ciel" of the Tartuffian ethics. The following century saw the accepted kinds augmented by bourgeois tragedy" and pathetic comedy, nicknamed "lachrymose "by its enemies; de Chassiron 4 attacked, and Diderot, Gellert and Lessing 5 defended the new arrival. In this way the schematism of the kinds continued to suffer violence and to cut a very poor figure; nevertheless, in spite of adversity, it made every effort to retain power even at the sacrifice of dignity: just as an absolute king turns constitutional by force of

1 Proginn. poet., Florence, 1627, iii. p. 130.

2 Cf. A. Belloni, Il seicento, Milan, 1898, pp. 162-164.

• Examens, and Discours du poème dramatique, de la tragédie, des trois unités, etc.

4 Réflexions sur le comique larmoyant, 1749 (trans. by Lessing, Werke, vol. cit.).

Gellert, De comaedia commovente, 1751; Lessing, Abhandlungen von den weinerlichen oder rührenden Lustspiele, 1754 (in Werke, vol. vii.).

Rebellion against rules in general.

G. Bruno.
Guarini.

Spanish critics.

circumstance, and chooses the lesser evil of squaring his divine right with the will of the nation.

This retention of power would have been more difficult had any success attended the attempts at rebellion against all laws, against law in general, which broke out in varying degrees at the end of the sixteenth century. Pietro Aretino made mock of the most sacred precepts: in a prologue to one of his comedies he remarks derisively, “ If you see more than five characters on the stage at once, do not laugh; for chains which would fasten water-mills to the river could not hold the fools of to-day." 1 A philosopher, Giordano Bruno, entered the lists against the "regulators of poetry" rules, said he, are derived from poetry: "there are as many genera and species of true rules as there are genera and species of true poets"; such an individualization of kinds dealt them a deathblow. "How then" (asks the interlocutory opponent) "shall veritable poets be recognized?" By their singing of verse (answers Bruno); "of that which, being sung, either delights or instructs, or delights and instructs at the same time." 2 In much the same way Guarini defended his Pastor fido in 1588, declaring " the world is the judge of poets; against its sentence there is no appeal."

"3

Amongst European countries, Spain was perhaps the sturdiest in her resistance to the pedantic theories of the writers of treatises; Spain was the land of freedom in criticism from Vives to Feijóo, from the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century when decadence of the old Spanish spirit allowed Luzán, with others, to introduce neo-classical poetry of Italian and French origin. That rules must change with the times and with actual conditions; that modern literature demands modern poetics; that work carried out contrary to established rule does not signify that it is contrary to all rule or unwilling to submit

1 Prologue to the Cortigiana, 1534.

2 Degli eroici furori in Opere italiane, ed. Gentile, ii. pp. 310-311.

3 Il Veratto (against Jason de Nores), Ferrara, 1588.

4 Menendez y Pelayo, op. cit. iii. pp. 174-175 (1st ed.), i.

itself to a higher law; that nature should give, not receive, laws; that the laws of the three unities are as ridiculous as it would be to forbid a painter to paint a large landscape in a small picture; that the pleasure, taste, approbation of readers and spectators are the deciding element in the long run; that notwithstanding the laws of counterpoint, the ear is the true judge of music; these affirmations and many like them are frequent in Spanish criticism of the period. One critic, Francisco de la Barreda (1622), went so far as to compassionate the strong wits of Italy bound by fear and cowardice (temerosos y acobardados) to rules that hampered them on every side;1 he may have been thinking of Tasso, a memorable case of such degradation. Lope de Vega wavered between neglect of rules in practice, and obsequious acceptance of them in theory, alleging in excuse for his conduct that he was forced to yield to the demands of the public who paid money to see his plays; he said, "when I write my comedies, I lock and double-lock the door against the precept-mongers, that they may not rise up and bear witness against me "; Art (that is, Poetics) speaks truth which is contradicted by the vulgar ignorant "; may the rules forgive us when we are induced to violate them." But a contemporary admirer of Lope's work writes of him that "en muchas partes de sus escritos dice que el no guardar el arte antiguo lo hace por conformarse con el gusto de la plebe dicelo por su natural modestia, y porqué no atribuya la malicia ignorante á arrogancia lo que es politica perfeccion."3

"

Giambattista Marino also protested "I assert that I G. B. Marino. have a more thorough knowledge of the rules than have all the pedants in the world; but the only true rule is to know how to break the rules at the right place and time, and to conform with the custom and taste of the day." 4 The drama of Spain, the comedy of art, and other literary novelties of the seventeenth century caused Minturno,

1 Menendez y Pelayo, op. cit. iii. p. 468 (2nd ed.).

2 Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609), ed. Morel Fatio, ll. 40-41, 138-140, 157-158.

3 Menendez y Pelayo, op. cit. iii. p. 459.

4 Marino, letter to G. Preti, in Lettere, Venice, 1627, p. 127.