As the individual[298] frees himself from the clogs of his mediæval guild, in literature as in life, there begins the distinctly modern idea of fame, of glory, as a personal achievement apart from community or state; and there, too, begins the idea of literary property. Fame of the poet had its classical tradition, and was asserted in a conventional, meaningless way by mediæval poets, chiefly in Latin; but the market value of a poem is something new.[299] From this time on there is a pathetic struggle in the poet’s mind whether he shall regard his poem as offspring to cherish or as ware to sell. Randolph, writing to his friend, Master Anthony Stafford, takes the nobler view:—
Let clowns get wealth and heirs: when I am gone ... If I a poem leave, that poem is my son.
There is pretty antithesis, too, between the director and the poet in Goethe’s play before the play in _Faust_,—one for his box-receipts, and the other for the solitudes of poetry and the gods. A happy solution has been found of late for this dilemma; over the naked contradiction of love and merchandise one throws the cloak of the artist. The artist begets in pure love of his art; and he sells for Falstaff’s reason,—it is his vocation. Until poetry got this market value, however, it was common goods; poets had written generically, as members of a class or guild,[300] and any member might use the common stock of expressions and ideas. A translator was as great as his original.[301] The eighth chapter of Dante’s essay on composition in the vernacular opens with a curious discourse about artistic property, as if the new idea and the new phrase needed a gloss. “When we say, ‘this is Peter’s _canzone_,’ we mean that Peter made it, not merely that he uttered it!” Such an explanation, however, seems timely enough if one remembers that “a mediæval writer held it to be improper to join his name to any literary composition,”[302] and that Dante, “first of the moderns” as he is, and personal as his work seems to be, actually names himself but once in the whole _Commedia_. Here is the dying struggle of that clan ownership[303] which had ruled from the days of the primitive horde; for it is clear that intellectual property would be the last kind to be developed, and even if the poet liked to see his name graven on the colder side of the rock, this was not an isolated, personal distinction, but was merged in the register of the guild like the names on a soldiers’ monument. Horace’s “write me down among the lyric poets” was an intelligible ambition to mediæval minds; but the purely personal triumph of his _non omnis móriar_ and its splendid context was alien to their way of thought. Barring the degree of genius in each, one may say that Dante and Victor Hugo were equally strong in their intense individuality; here is a case where Gautier’s phrase holds good that the brain of an artist was the same under the Pharaohs as it is now; yet that conditions change the product, that the individual note, piercing in the modern, becomes almost communal and generic in the older poet, that a distinct curve of evolution to the personal extreme, even in artistic poetry, can be drawn between them, is clear to probation for any one who will compare two famous passages which a hasty inference would probably declare to be on the same straight individual line. If one looks at the whole passage where Dante speaks of his poetic achievement,[304] and if one neither isolates a phrase nor yet sentimentalizes it all to suit modern ideas; if one notes the satisfaction which the poet feels with his work in and for the guild, and how he passes the time of day with a brother craftsman; then one will find in it not only a touch of artlessness, of what is called, rightly or wrongly, the mediæval, the communal, but an effacement of personality in the very act of asserting it. He shows, as it were, his diploma from the guild of poets. To bring this artlessness into clear relief, one has only to compare the thirty-second of Hugo’s _Chants du Crépuscule_, where the poet, alone in an old tower, addresses the bell which hangs there, its pious inscription insulted by the obscenities, blasphemies, and futilities written over it; he is no exile, this poet, but proudly and contemptuously isolated from his kind, whose brutishness he has just deplored; and he speaks thus to the bell,—of all survivals the most characteristic of mediæval thought, the veriest symbol of communal religious life:—