by Macrobius (whose reputation was great in the middle ages), by Servius (the great commentator on Virgil), and, after a long interval, by Martianus Capella. Latin criticism sank into mere pedantry about rhetoric and grammar. This continued throughout the Dark Ages, until the 13th century, when rhythmical treatises, of which the Labyrinthus of Eberhard (1212?) and the Ars rhythmica of John of Garlandia (John Garland) are the most famous, came into fashion. These writings testified to a growing revival of a taste for poetry.
It is, however, in the masterly technical treatise De vulgari eloquio, generally attributed to Dante, the first printed (in Italian) in 1529, that modern poetical criticism takes its first step. The example of this admirable book was not adequately followed; throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, criticism is mainly indirect and accidental. Boccaccio, indeed, is the only figure worthy of mention, between Dante and Erasmus. With the Renaissance came a blossoming of Humanist criticism in Italy, producing such excellent specimens as the Sylvae of Poliziano, the Poetics (1527) of Vida, and the Poetica of Trissino, the best of a whole crop of critical works produced, often by famous names, between 1525 and 1560. These were followed by sounder scholars and acuter theorists: by Scaliger with his epoch-making Poetices (1561); by L. Castelvetro, whose Poetica (1570) started the modern cultivation of the Unities and asserted the value of the Epic; by Tasso with his Discorsi (1587); and by Francesco Patrizzi in his Poetica (1586).
In France, the earliest and for a long time the most important specimen of literary criticism was the Défense et illustration de la langue française, published in 1549 by Joachim du Bellay. Ronsard, also, wrote frequently and ably on the art of poetry. The theories of the Pléiade were summed up in the Art poétique of Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, which belongs to 1574 (though not printed until 1605).
In England, the earliest literary critic of importance was Thomas Wilson, whose Art of Rhetoric was printed in 1553, and the earliest student of poetry, George Gascoigne, whose Instruction appeared in 1575. Gascoigne is the first writer who deals intelligently with the subject of English prosody. He was followed by Thomas Drant, Harvey, Gosson, Lodge and Sidney, whose controversial pamphlets belong to the period between 1575 and 1580. Among Elizabethan “arts” or “defences” of English poetry are to be mentioned those of William Webbe (1586), George Puttenham (1589), Thomas Campion (1602), and Samuel Daniel (1603). With the tractates of Ben Jonson, several of them lost, the criticism of the Renaissance may be said to close.
A new era began throughout Europe when Malherbe started, about 1600, a taste for the neo-classic or anti-romantic school of poetry, taking up the line which had been foreshadowed by Castelvetro. Enfin Malherbe vint, and he was supported in his revolution by Regnier, Vaugelas, Balzac, and finally by Corneille himself, in his famous prefatory discourses. It was Boileau, however, who more than any other man stood out at the close of the 17th century as the law-giver of Parnassus. The rules of the neo-classics were drawn together and arranged in a system by René Rapin, whose authoritative treatises mainly appeared between 1668 and 1674. It is in writings of this man, and of the Jesuits, Le Bossu and Bouhours, that the preposterous rigidity of the formal classic criticism is most plainly seen. The influence of these three critics was, however, very great throughout Europe, and we trace it in the writings of Dryden, Addison and Rymer. In the course of the 18th century, when the neoclassic creed was universally accepted, Pope, Blair, Kames, Harris, Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson were its most distinguished exponents in England, while Voltaire, Buffon (to whom we owe the phrase “the style is the man”), Marmontel, La Harpe and Suard were the types of academic opinion in France.
Modern, or more properly Romantic, criticism came in when the neo-classic tradition became bankrupt throughout Europe at the very close of the 18th century. It has been heralded in Germany by the writings of Lessing, and in France by those of Diderot. Of the reconstruction of critical opinion in the 19th century it is impossible to speak here with any fulness, it is contained in the record of the recent literature of each European language. It is noticeable, in England, that the predominant place in it was occupied, in violent contrast with Disraeli’s dictum, by those who had obviously not failed in imaginative composition, by Wordsworth, by Shelley, by Keats, by Landor, and pre-eminently by S. T. Coleridge, who was one of the most penetrative, original and imaginative critics who have ever lived. In France, the importance of Sainte-Beuve is not to be ignored or even qualified; after manifold changes of taste, he remains as much a master as he was a precursor. He was followed by Théophile Gautier, Saint-Marc, Girardin, Paul de Saint Victor, and a crowd of others, down to Taine and the latest school of individualistic critics, comparable with Matthew Arnold, Pater, and their followers in England.
See G. Saintsbury, A History of Criticism (3 vols., 1902–1904); J. E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (2nd ed. 1908); Théry, Histoire des opinions littéraires (1849); J. A. Symonds, The Revival of Learning (1877); Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, i. (1865), ii. (1868); Bourgoin, Les Maîtres de la critique au XVII e siècle (1889); Paul Hamelius, Die Kritik in der englischen Literatur (1897); S. H. Butcher, The Poetics of Aristotle (1898); H. L. Havell and Andrew Lang, Longinus on the Sublime (1890). See also the writings of Sainte-Beuve, Matthew Arnold, F. Brunetière, Anatole France, Walter Pater, passim. (E. G.)
CRITIUS and NESIOTES, two Greek sculptors of uncertain
school, of the time of the Persian Wars. When Xerxes carried
away to Persia the statues of Harmodius and Aristogiton made
by Antenor, Critius and Nesiotes were commissioned to replace
them. By the help of coins and reliefs, two statues at Naples,
wrongly restored as gladiators, have been identified as copies of
the tyrannicides of Critius; and to them well apply the words
in which Lucian (Rhetor. praecepta, 9) describes the works of
Critius and Nesiotes, “closely knit and sinewy, and hard and
severe in outline.” Critius also made a statue of the armed
runner Epicharinus.
CRITOLAUS, Greek philosopher, was born at Phaselis in the 2nd century B.C. He lived to the age of eighty-two and died probably before 111 B.C. He studied philosophy under Aristo of Ceos and became one of the leaders of the Peripatetic school by his eminence as an orator, a scholar and a moralist. There has been considerable discussion as to whether he was the immediate successor of Aristo, but the evidence is confused and unprofitable. In general he was a loyal adherent to the Peripatetic succession (cf. Cicero, De fin. v. 5 “C. imitari antiquos voluit”), though in some respects he went beyond his predecessors. For example, he held that pleasure is an evil (Gellius, Noctes Atticae, ix. 5. 6), and definitely maintained that the soul consists of aether. The end of existence was to him the general perfection of the natural life, including the goods of the soul and the body, and also external goods. Cicero says in the Tusculans that the goods of the soul entirely outweighed for him the other goods (“tantum propendere illam bonorum animi lancem”). Further, he defended against the Stoics the Peripatetic doctrine of the eternity of the world and the indestructibility of the human race. There is no observed change in the natural order of things; mankind re-creates itself in the same manner according to the capacity given by Nature, and the various ills to which it is heir, though fatal to individuals, do not avail to modify the whole. Just as it is absurd to suppose that man is merely earth-born, so the possibility of his ultimate destruction is inconceivable. The world, as the manifestation of eternal order, must itself be immortal. The life of Critolaus is not recorded. One incident alone is preserved. From Cicero (Acad. ii. 45) it appears that he was sent with Carneades and Diogenes to Rome in 156–155 B.C. to protest against the fine of 500 talents imposed on Athens in punishment for the sack of Oropus. The three ambassadors lectured on philosophy in Rome with so much success that Cato was alarmed and had them dismissed the city. Gellius describes his arguments as scita et teretia.
Consult the article Peripatetics, and histories of ancient philosophy, e.g. Zeller.
