XI. THE POETICS IN THE NETHERLANDS AND A refugee in Holland and England, SaintEvremond lets one see that Aristotelian criticism is cosmopolitan, and that its centre has shifted from Italy to the North. Seventeenthcentury Dutch scholars 13 perhaps led in utilizing and disseminating the Poetics. The shift runs parallel with a better understanding of Greek literature, and with a change in the Renaissance, which has become less characteristically Latin-a process reaching to our own day. Grotius, while writing the best of Latin verse, sees the pre-eminence of Greek tragedy and of the Poetics; in his translation of Euripides' Phænissæ he calls Aristotle ‘optimus magister.' In Italy the arguments, sometimes nearly balanced, in the main favored Virgil and epic poetry; in France the Pléiade longed for a great national epic; yet in France as well as Holland it was rather tragedy that flourished, partly under the influence of the Dutch scholar Heinsius. The Dutch, of course, read the Italian critics. The great poet Vondel (1587-1679) knew the commentaries of Robortelli, Maggi and Lombardi, and Castelvetro. But Vondel read the Poetics itself, at least in Latin; on the unity of action, on tragic character, on recognition and reversal, he consulted Aristotle at first hand. The vogue of Scaliger is seen when his definition of tragedy is quoted by Vondel on a par with that in the Poetics. Nevertheless, in Holland as elsewhere, the direct influence of Aristotle in the seventeenth century is less apparent than that of Horace: the poets aimed at a mixture of utility with delight. In the countries of the Reformation the desire for moral improvement through the drama is shown in the popularity of Biblical subjects-in Grotius' Adamus Exsul, for instance. Greek, Roman, and Christian themes run side by side, or intermix. In 1671 Jacob Vinck translates Euripides' Hippolytus into Dutch, with certain liberties which he defends by appealing to Aristotle; in 1684 Pieter Langedult gives us the play, Christ Suffering and Glorified. The Netherlands were touched by learning from every side, from Italy, France, Germany, and England. Rodenburg's Eglentiers Poëtens Borst-weringh, based upon Sidney's Defense of Poesy, transmits Aristotle and Italian criticism indirectly enough. The leading student of the Poetics in the Netherlands, however, was Daniel Heinsius, whose work (1611) vies in eminence with that of Scaliger and Castelvetro up to the time of Dryden and Rymer; thereafter, in England, we detect the influence of Corneille and Rapin. With Heinsius should be mentioned G. J. Vossius and his treatises on poetry (1647). D'Aubignac advises the dramatist to study Aristotle, Horace, Castelvetro, Vida, Heinsius, Vossius, and Scaliger, of whom not a word should be lost.' But there were earlier influences in England, where the Poetics became known, if not through Erasmus of Rotterdam, or his pupil the Spaniard Vives, then through German rhetoricians and theorists on education like Johann Sturm. Aside from the mediæval translation of Averroes by Hermann, the first allusion to the Poetics by a German writer has been found in Luther's Address to the Christian Nobles (1520), as the first appearance of the Greek text in a collective edition of Aristotle was at Basel in 1531. In the same year Erasmus, who supervised that edition, mentions the trea tise in a letter; his writings betray no interest in the Poetics, but his edition had great prestige north of the Alps, and no part of it would escape notice in Germany, in the Netherlands, or in England. In 1534 Camerarius, commenting on Sophocles, models a definition of tragedy after that of the Poetics, yet tinged with the medieval conception. Bucer, writing at Cambridge before 1551, mentions the Aristotelian 'reversals of fortune.' Melanchthon, like Erasmus, is concerned with rhetoric and education; for him the end of tragedy is to force rude and savage souls into moderation, to strike whole audiences with horror and move them to pity. There is a suggestion of the medical catharsis, not purification, in Hans Sachs (1560)14-whether a chance intuition, or gathered from an Italian treatise or the like, we can not say. Schosser's Disputationes de Tragedia (1569) is based on the Poetics. Of the German educational leaders, Sturm (1507-89), humanist, rhetorician, student of Cicero and Horace, was also important for the study of Greek; we must return to him in connection with Ascham. Toward the end of the sixteenth century Italian criticism was well-known in Germany; in the seventeenth, the work of Heinsius and Vossius, and of the Roman Jesuit Alexander Donatus (1631), was popular. The dramatist Gryphius (1650) is exceptional for his pathological interpretation of the catharsis, possibly borrowed from Galluzzi or some other Italian. By 1700 the emotional aim of poetry was admitted, though down to Lessing, and even by him, the ethical aim is recognized. Both he and Goethe, however, realize that the end of tragedy is an emotional effect; the prodesse of Horace has yielded to his delectare-the essential position of Aristotle is now maintained. |