INTRODUCTION

FORMAL criticism in modern Europe has its origins

in the Italy of the later Renaissance, where the discussion of literary problems was merely one phase of that intellectual casuistry which arose out of the Catholic Reaction. On the basis of an ancient literary heritage the Italians developed a definite outlook on literature, a body of rules and theories, and the tentative beginnings of a critical method. They introduced the England of Sidney's age to the formal study of literature, and English criticism began. How these materials were altered to the needs of English taste, how ancient rule was adapted to modern practice, in a word, how the critical spirit of Sidney and Puttenham was transmuted into that of Dryden, Rymer, and Temple, is the subject of this inquiry.

I. THE JACOBEAN OUTLOOK: BACON AND JONSON

Bacon and Jonson are the representative critics of the Jacobean period. Both alike inherited the traditions of Elizabethan culture, and modified or transformed them. The imaginative element in Sidney's theory of poetry was carried on by Bacon, who added historic and scientific factors not in the Elizabethan scheme. The classical side of Sidney's theory was developed by Jonson, who gave a new and increased prestige to the rules formulated by the Italians, and shifted the interest of criticism to the external and objective side of literary art.

Bacon touches the subject of criticism but lightly, yet his utterances have a high significance in its history. His judgements of concrete literature are casual and few in

2

number; perhaps the most important is that on the Ciceronian imitators of the Renaissance, in whom he condemns an excessive attention to the externals of style.' His conception of literary history, which he assigns to a place of highest dignity among the historical sciences, is more important: he conceives of its method as a synthesis based on historical research,-not like critics to blame or to praise, but to represent things as they are,-and its purpose is to discover the relations of literary activity with the political and religious life in which it has its source, and to aim at a final portrayal of the genius of each age in the development of letters.

Underlying these utterances is a general classification of the arts and sciences, according to the three divisions of the mind inherited from the traditional psychology: history is referred to the memory, philosophy to the understanding, and poetry to the imagination. This is virtually the classification of the Spaniard Huarte, which had been adopted by Charron. The imagination itself, as a mental process, had already impelled curiosity in classical antiquity; and the Italians of the Renaissance, from the time of Pico della Mirandola (whose treatise De Imaginatione was translated into French by Baïf in 1557), had devoted special monographs to the subject. But their interest was, for the most part, in the pathology of the imagination: they conceived of it primarily as a source of physical or mental aberration, alike in the poet, the lunatic, and the lover; Burton illustrates this point of view in England, and the number of continental authorities cited by him indicates the diffusion of the interest among his predecessors and contemporaries. This explains in part the suspicion of the

1 i. 2 sq.

2 i. 4 sq., and especially De Augmentis, ii. 4.

3 See note to i. 4. 10-13.

Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. i, sect. 2, mem. 3, subs. 2. Cf. Henry More, Philos. Writings, ed. 1712, pp. 6, 14; Fulke Greville, ed. Grosart, i. 9-11, iv. 222; Gregory Smith, ii. 19-20.

imagination during the seventeenth century: the madness which, sympathetically or unsympathetically, was associated with the poet by Plato and Aristotle, by Drayton and Dryden, was referred especially to it, making it appear the abnormal side, rather than the creative force, of poetry. Bacon, however, connects it definitely with the latter function, and frankly adopts the place given to it in Huarte's scheme.

2

Aristotle had defined poetry as an imitation of life, using the term, not in the sense of a mere copy, but of a generalized representation of reality: 'It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen, what is possible according to the laws of probability or necessity... Poetry tends to express the universal; history, the particular.' Bacon uses the term 'imagination to indicate the mental process which transforms the prosaic 'what has happened' into the poetic 'what may or should happen'. The purpose of poetry is 'to giue some shadowe of satisfaction to the minde of Man in those points wherein the Nature of things doth denie it... by submitting the shewes of things to the desires of the Mind'. Bacon and Aristotle, therefore, do not differ in their conception of poetry. Bacon has given a name to the idealizing process of the Aristotelian imitation, has connected this process with a particular division of the mind. They do differ, however, in their conceptions of the source or origin of poetry. The desire to reproduce actual life is for Aristotle one of the fundamental sources; for Bacon, it is man's dissatisfaction with actual life, and his desire to transmute it into forms more satisfactory to the mind. Here Aristotle is less consistent, or at least less clear, than Bacon.

3

1 Cf. Malebranche, Recherche de la Vérité, bk. ii. A history of this subject, more intimately touching letters than Ambrosi's La Psicologia dell' Immaginazione nella Storia della Filosofia, Rome, 1898, is still to be written.

Poetry differs from history and philosophy, then, according to Bacon, in that these reflect the external world without change; poetry reflects the world, but transforms it through the imagination, whether the events of life are narrated as past in the epic, represented as present action in the drama, or allegorized under symbolic forms in what Bacon calls 'parabolic' poetry. In all these three divisions of the art (he recognizes no others) poetry limits itself to a heightened portrayal of the outer world. Bacon does not recognize those forms which reflect the inner soul of man; satires, elegies, sonnets, and all other lyrical forms seem to him to belong rather to the domain of philosophy or rhetoric.' If in this he clearly foreshadows the neo-classical indifference to lyric poetry, his treatment of 'parabolic' poetry illustrates tendencies both sympathetic and unsympathetic to the new movement. His interest in it is scientific or philosophic rather than aesthetic: it appeals to the reason as well as to the imagination; it approaches more closely than the other forms to science; for him, therefore, it is the supreme form of poetry." On the other hand, his interest in the mysteries of allegorical interpretation is a mediae. val survival, reinforced by the subtler speculations of the Renaissance. In the Wisdom of the Ancients, and elsewhere, he opened the way for a series of successors, of whom Henry Reynolds and Alexander Ross are the most important literary, and Henry More perhaps the most important philosophical, examples.

The objective and imaginative side of Bacon's theory connects him with Elizabethan literature, especially with the drama, of which his is the most significant critical expression. He recognized the power of the theatre, explaining it on the principle, as it is now called, of the 'psychology of the crowd'. His classification of the lyric 1 De Aug. ii. 13.

3

2 Ibid.

3 Cf. note to i. 6, 30.

with philosophy and rhetoric explains the impersonal and imitative forms of lyric poetry at the end of the sixteenth century, and looks forward to the more complicated forms of the 'metaphysical school'; it is significant that his theory distinguishes verse of this sort from imaginative poetry, and equally significant that it recognizes no place for the lyric which reflects the inner life through the imagination. Through the various forms of his thought he anticipates a number of the rival schools of the future: on the objective side of his critical thought he is related to Jonson;1 on the side of allegory, to the school of mystical interpretation; on the side of experimental philosophy, to the new school of Science. Here his leadership, which found impassioned recognition in Cowley's Address to the Royal Society, produced fruitful results in criticism throughout the period of the Restora. tion.2

The determining factor in Jonson's early outlook on literature was Sidney's Defence of Poesie. This work, as is well known, circulated in manuscript for a dozen years within the courtly circle, and furnished material to Puttenham and Harington; but it was not widely known until it was published in 1595. For Jonson, then entering on his career, its influence was momentous; from it he derived his sense of the high dignity of poetry, his conception of the drama, and his classical point of view. Every critical utterance in Every Man in his Humour, acted in 1597 or 1598, exhibits strong marks of this influence. The prologue, not published until much later, though ascribed by Gifford to 1596, is a noble patchwork 1 Cf. i. 26-27, 42-43.

2 For a fuller discussion of Bacon's critical position, see K. Fischer, Francis Bacon und seine Nachfolger, 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1875, pp. 269-92, 311-14; Jacquinet, Francisci Baconi de Re Litteraria Judicia, Paris, 1863; and E. Flügel, 'Bacon's Historia Literaria,' in Anglia, 1899, vol. xxii.