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Jamiel Sheikh
Mastering Corda
by Jamiel Sheikh
Copyright © 2021 Jamiel Sheikh. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North,
Sebastopol, CA 95472.
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[email protected].
Although I had been familiar with Corda for some time, my first
interaction with R3 came accidentally in the spring of 2018 when I
noticed a Corda bootcamp being offered. I signed up for the
bootcamp, excited to learn about how to code on, what was for me,
a new blockchain. I was already intimate with building and teaching
about decentralized applications using Solidity on Ethereum and
Bitcoin scripts, but Corda was a permissioned chain and
permissioned chains were only beginning to come to the forefront at
the time. A few weeks later and a week before the bootcamp I
received a notification from EventBrite informing me that the class
had been cancelled. I later learned that it was cancelled due to low
enrollments.
Saddened, I decided to email R3 and ask them if they could
reschedule the bootcamp. My request went into their ticketing
system and bounced around between several people (I know this
because I received a reply with the full email thread), and a
gentleman by the name of Guy Hochstetler agreed to meet with me.
Amazingly, it so happened to be that my office was directly across
the street from R3 with only Bryant Park between us, and we
decided to meet for lunch. To prepare for the meeting, I decided to
spend a week digging into the technical aspects of the Corda
framework, read the two Corda whitepapers, and catch up on the
latest news related to R3 and the Corda platform.
We met at a sushi restaurant nearby on a crisp and sunny afternoon.
I can vividly recall the meeting and the words Guy said that struck
me the most: “Corda is being used everywhere, but no one knows
about us.” I found that statement incredibly interesting because it
meant that Corda was not a solution hunting for a problem but
technology that was winning adoption. As Guy and I talked, we
found common ground in our enterprise experiences: he had worked
for IBM doing WebSphere lab services guiding customers in building
enterprise class solutions, and I used to work for Sun Microsystems
Java Center in New York City doing much the same. At the end of
what turned out to be a two-hour lunch, Guy invited me to tour R3’s
offices and, without hesitation, I accepted and we headed towards
R3’s headquarters in New York City chatting along the way about
enterprise systems.
Fast-forward two hours, and suffice it to say, the tour of R3 piqued
my interest. I cannot honestly put into words the experience I had.
As I walked through the office and was introduced to a number of
individuals introduced to me by Guy, I could feel this amazing
positive and creative energy. The first person Guy introduced me to
was Austin Moothart, then a solution engineer who shared some
incredibly insightful ideas around DLT architecture and design. You
could see it in Austin’s eyes: he was deeply and genuinely
passionate about what he was talking about. The energy in the R3
office was atypical to what you’d find at a startup, never mind a
large enterprise. It was not the bubbly, frothy, “hype-ish,” “build the
excitement and revenues will come later” type of stuff. This was way
different. Here was a group of people who seemed to actually
believe in their company, product, and mission and as such were so
genuinely radically open, humble, and creative. Everyone was well-
dressed, extremely intelligent, and not once did anyone try to sell
me on Corda. And that’s when I was sold on Corda. Having engaged
with hundreds of enterprises and startups over the past 20 years,
R3’s culture immediately stood out.
Today, I know many members of the R3 leadership, sales, partners,
solutions, and engineering teams, and I am still constantly amazed
at the depth of talent and technical acumen they have accumulated.
Building a blockchain is no easy task; it is one of the most advanced
and intellectually rigorous products human civilization has ever
produced, but you won’t find flame wars on the R3 Slack channels.
Instead, you’ll find incredibly useful and insightful conversations and
support from dedicated and helpful people from the Corda
community.
Maybe blockchain has matured? Does this mean that Corda is the
“winner” of the blockchain race? It’s too early to say, but what I do
know is that I am enjoying my Corda journey and am delighted to
share what I’ve learned through my interactions with R3, working on
projects for my customers and digging through the source code with
you.
Constant width
Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to
program elements such as variable or function names, databases,
data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.
NOTE
This element signifies a general note.
WARNING
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and any additional information. You can access this page at
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Acknowledgments
A book is always raised by a village of people. In my case, I was
especially fortunate to have some of the best resources possible,
some involved directly and many indirectly.
A very special thank-you to the following:
From O’Reilly:
Michelle Smith, my acquisitions editor, who took a huge gamble
onme to do this book at a time very few people knew about
Corda and graciously had patience with my tumultuous schedule
and personal life. I still remember my nervous Italian dinner in
NYC where she encouraged me to produce the best book I could.
Amelia Blevins, who made sure I produced quality work and
facilitated a smooth writing process with her calming guiding
voice and incredible editorial insights.
Danny Elfanbaum, who painstakingly improved the quality of the
book and made sure the end product was aesthetically readable.
Holly Forsyth, who helped significantly improve the language and
tone of the book, making it a more fluid read.
Melissa Potter, the first editor on the book, who created the
momentum for me to write as best as I could as early in the
process as possible.
From R3:
Guy Hochstetler for introducing me to Corda in the spring of
2018 and bringing me into the R3 office for the first time where
my love for the people at R3 and its culture started. Guy’s deep
enterprise architecture experience was what allowed me to trust
his suggestion that I pay attention to Corda.
Austin Moothart, who, despite being the busiest Corda rock star
in New York, always found time to explain the deeper intricacies
of Corda to me and made sure I earned my stars during the
Corda certification teach back.
Nick Rogers, who if I had to choose a co-author would have been
the one, provided enormous feedback and direction into this
book especially around cryptography, RPC, tokens… actually,
everything.
Todd McDonald, the co-founder of R3, who always, through one-
line emails, opened doors for me to speak to the right people and
took the time to sit down and go over R3’s amazing history and
guest speak at my events and classes.
David Rutter, the CEO of R3, for building Corda...and endorsing
this book.
Mike Hearn, for answering questions on Corda and giving me a
great timeline of his involvement with Satoshi Nakomoto and R3.
Roger Willis, the creator of the Corda Token SDK, for providing
patient explanations to my questions around the Token SDK.
Alisa DiCaprio for her tremendous insights into supply chain and
giving me the opportunity to teach Corda that opened the door
to write this book...and that time she almost fainted on stage and
I got her an energy bar.
Lamar Thomas for teaching me about node management and
analytic perspectives and how I should always be learning a
foreign language.
Jeff Cooperstein, who I had the good fortune to work at Lehman
Brothers with, gave me insights into the Corda Enterprise pricing
model and how the banks are using Corda, opening a number of
doors for me, and providing me the bits to Corda Enterprise
evaluation.
Sarah Hale, who has always been at the forefront of the
marketing of Corda and partnering with me on our events and
promotions that have increased my understanding of the Corda
ecosystem.
Isabelle Corbett, who is the dangerous combination of a brilliant
attorney and blockchain guru, who I first met at the World Bank
in DC and shared a meal with at CordaCon in London in 2019,
and who believed in me enough to get me a desk at R3 that
allowed me to learn so much about Corda.
Richard Irving, the Corda DevOps and infrastructure wizard who
had a knack for taking very complex infrastructure questions and
unpacking them into simple answers.
Ronnie Kher, one of the few people who truly understands the
insurance industry, for making insurance actually a topic I could
sit through and listen about and showing how blockchain can
change that industry in very concrete ways.
Stephanie Perez for opening doors for me at enterprises to help
drive Corda education, forcing me to learn more about Corda.
Tom Menner for constantly asking when the book is coming out,
kicking my ass to do better, and making me feel younger when
he asked, “How come you know about Transarc Encina?” only to
reveal his depth of enterprise system experience and knowledge.
Abbas Ali for providing me a ton of material on Corda’s identity
strategy—which I’ll include in the second edition of this book—
just was too much to absorb, bruv.
Katie Escoto for helping me respectably survive the R3 Corda
Certification for Instructors test and opening some great doors to
some great clients through her education strategy.
Ivar Wiersma for plugging me into the R3 ecosystem to speak to
amazing startups that are building the future on Corda, allowing
me to see the plethora of use cases in the market.
James Darby for working with me to meticulously put together
and verify the table describing the Corda startup landscape.
From Chainhaus:
Michael D’acampora for working through some of the code
examples to makes them work beyond just my computer (and
mind) and teaching me to surf on a longboard off the coast of
Long Island to destress from book writing.
Aliasgar Merchant for pressuring me to get the book out so that
he could get a free copy of it despite reviewing all the material
anyway.
Book Reviewers:
A special thank-you to those who took the time out of their busy
schedules to review the book and provide absolutely critical and
insightful feedback: Michael D’acampora, Karen Kilroy, Austin
Moothart, Aliasgar Merchant, Nick Rogers, Destry Saul, and Elliott
Williams.
What Is Blockchain?
When thinking of blockchain, imagine a notebook that tracks and
stores economic activity between individuals in tamper-proof form—
a ledger that’s publicly accessible and owned by no one person
exclusively. Anyone can read and write to this ledger, but a moat
around it, enforced by the mathematics of cryptography, provides
economic incentives and disincentives to writing in it. Because
anyone is allowed to have a copy of the ledger and continuously
synchronize updates and changes made to it with other copyholders,
there’s no central authority. To write on a public blockchain ledger,
you need to spend some amount of money through the expenditure
of energy consumed by computing power, and anyone else holding a
copy has the right to vote and agree that what you wrote is valid.
Therefore, you’ll think twice about what and how much you’ll want
to write. A blockchain is effectively an information storage system
with economic moats around it that is open and accessible to the
public.
You can think of a distributed ledger as a type, subset, or cousin of
what is generally termed as blockchain. Distributed ledgers leverage
many of the concepts of public blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum
but make trade-offs by giving up certain features, such as pure
decentralization and unfettered public access, to gain other features
enterprises require, like data privacy, legal recourse, transaction
performance, and transaction rate scalability. Distributed ledgers
allow multiple parties to have a consistent view of their transactions
with one another on a need-to-know basis.
Figure 1-1. The value of any arbitrary PDF file containing desired information and
its value as the quantity available increases.
What Is Corda?
Ever since Ethereum ushered in the ability to deploy rich smart
contracts, business logic, and code that resides and executes on a
blockchain, new blockchains making all sorts of claims seem to be
cropping up every month. As it stands today, the leaders in the
enterprise blockchain space are starting to emerge, one of which is
Corda, alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum, Quorum, and Hyperledger.
Corda is a platform on which two or more cooperating enterprises or
domains (companies, departments, teams, etc.) can define and
execute a consistent, agreed-upon set of semantics and business
processes that can reside and run on top of a shared ledger system.
This allows for seamless collaboration and more efficient consensus
of business deals and transactions. Corda takes the best of the
business process–management world and mixes the innovations of
blockchain in with it without compromising security and privacy. A
Corda network is the amalgamation of a group of cooperating
organizational units, called participants or parties, their respective
shared and private business models and logic, the Corda platform,
and the services the platform provides.
Corda is middleware technology—like messaging, an application
server, an enterprise service bus, or an object broker—but with
advancements from Bitcoin, one of the first few contributions that
gained public and open source community adoption that is now
being retrofitted for the enterprise.
Although Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains seek to disintermediate
by removing central authorities, like a central bank, Corda’s core
disruption is not that it encourages or promises disintermediation via
decentralization , but also that it encourages business partners to
mediate among themselves and think about consensus at the
business level.
This is not to imply that business partners are currently in open
conflict with one another–they wouldn’t be partners if they were,
although they may be competitors. But there are inherent, deep
differences in how two cooperating partners do the very same
business, say a mortgage bank and a title insurance company, that
create unnecessary costs. If the business partners can sit down and
find economic incentives by discussing how to commonalize shared
business data models and processes that they are interdependent
on, then this could result in a significant increase in trust between
the partners, reduction in costs, and potentially a radical change in
how business is done.
While Corda is a shared platform, data or infrastructure is not
necessarily shared. Organizations can expect complete data and
transaction privacy, full ownership and control of the data, and all
the protections available behind a firewall. Any participating
organization can choose to walk away with their data at any time,
maintaining full possession of it at all times. Corda is a framework
that is entirely happy to live inside of corporate firewalls and mind its
own business and communicate with other business partners
through those firewalls.
Business Cases
Corda can transform how your business works, especially in the B2B
space, and create value via new revenue streams and significant and
material cost reductions. Any problem that can be solved by
automating multilateral consensus or agreement can benefit from
Corda—and this is a large number of business problems. We can
categorize the business cases broadly into digital assets,
reconciliation, and traceability.
Tokenization
Tokens (covered in depth in Chapter 9) can be used as a conduit to
trade and fractionalize on blockchain assets that already exist in the
real world—like a house, car, credit default swap, or equity—and
gain the benefits of mitigating double spend. The asset itself is not
traded on the blockchain because its full digitized representation is
not possible because of limitations of the industry or physicality, and
so a proxy digital representation is traded instead. For example,
because they’re physical assets, a shipping container or house
cannot literally be brought into the digital world and so are instead
represented by tokens. An equity stock is a set of rights and is more
easily represented as a token. A stock certificate is a paper token of
those rights.
At the most basic level, a token is a transferable digital pointer to an
asset, whether tangible or intangible. In most use cases today,
tokens are used to represent existing real-world assets, and trading
those tokens is equivalent to trading the real-world asset, as shown
in Figure 1-2. Of course, in such scenarios, the right legal framework
is required to assure the buyer or seller of a token that the asset or
title to it is in fact legally transferred and that the transfer is
enforceable by law if need be.
Figure 1-3. A digital asset or native digital token is the asset itself.
Because assets can from their inception be wholly, intrinsically, and
entirely digital, a whole new category of opportunities opens up as
new types of digital assets, literally from the fancies of our
imaginations, can be concocted and traded as long as there’s a
willing buyer and seller or liquidity available. Tokenization and digital
assets present a compelling business case for use of DLTs like Corda,
and we can expect all of our current financial infrastructure to be
based on DLTs within the next 10 years.2
Capital Raising
A common use of tokens has been to raise funds through
crowdfunding campaigns via token issuances; a simple conceptual
framework of this is shown in Figure 1-4. These were very popular
from 2016 to 2018, with many of the campaigns skirting regulatory
requirements set by regulators like the Securities and Exchange
Commission. Tokens with no underlying control and redemption
schemes, no clear legal recourse, and not necessarily representing
any underlying asset were sold to raise capital for technology and
blockchain projects. As a result, many fundraising campaigns
became defunct, and many investors lost money.
As regulation entered into the token issuance markets in 2019, token
issuances subsided momentarily only to begin to pick up again
slightly in early 2020. The Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS)
Act allows capital raising through the public up to $1,070,000 for
projects that meet specific requirements. This amount is expected to
go up to $5 million in the coming years, creating new venues for
entrepreneurs to raise capital through token issuances.
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II.
We now have before us the more important, but also the more
difficult, task of summing up the achievements and the shortcomings
of the whole period covered by this volume—the only period, be it
remembered, in which Criticism was regarded from the point of view
of a commonly accepted, if not very commonly understood,
orthodoxy. This of itself is an advantage, which, though it has not
recently counted for very much, will never be overlooked by true
critics. Even if we drop the quod semper, the quod ubique, quod ab
omnibus has a weight which leaves it wholly for the other side to
show case and cause against. Orthodoxy may be really right—really
orthodox; on that head it has at least an even chance against any of
its opponents. Even if it is not, it has merits which they can rarely
claim. It has no temptations for the clever fool, who is perhaps on
the whole the most pestilent, intellectually, of human beings. It
demands a certain amount of self-abnegation, which is always a
good thing. It does not perhaps really offer any greater temptation
to the merely stupid than does the cheap heterodoxy of other times.
Above all, it directly tends to a certain intellectual calmness—to an
absence of fuss, and worry, and pother, which is certainly not one of
the least characteristics of the Judge. At all times the wise man
would rather be orthodox than not; and at most times, though not
quite at all, the wisest men have been orthodox, if only because they
have recognised that every opinion has some amount of truth in it,
and that this truth, plus the advantages of orthodoxy just
mentioned, is greatest, and should prevail.
This will be recognised by all fair-minded persons as a handsome
allowance in any case; it is surely a particularly handsome allowance
when the arbiter happens not to be a partisan of the orthodoxy in
question. And it is quite sincere. The present writer has emerged
from the serious and consecutive examination of “classical” critics,
necessary for the writing of this volume, with a distinctly higher
opinion of them generally, with a higher opinion in most cases in
particular, than he held previously on piecemeal and imperfect
acquaintance. It is only in such a case as that of Boileau—where an
almost consummate faculty of expression masks really small critical
gifts, and where the worst faults of the critical character, personal
rudeness and spite, are continually lurking behind what seem to be
systematic judgments—that the result of the reading has gone the
other way. At the same time, if we take the true reading of illud
Syrianum, “Judex damnatur [capitis cum [in]nocens [culpatur vel
minime],” then the case of the criticism with which we have been
dealing becomes somewhat parlous. It is all the worse because its
worsening is gradual and continuous. The sins of the earliest
Renaissance criticism are sins chiefly of neglect, and are not as a
rule aggravated by commission; while its merits are very great. We
could have done nothing without it: at best we should have had to
do for ourselves all that it has done for us. But the bad side of the
matter betrays itself in the code-making of the seventeenth century;
it is but imperfectly and unsatisfactorily disguised in the
compromises of the earlier eighteenth; and it appears in all its
deformity in the La Harpian recrudescence.
The fault of the whole is undoubtedly but an aggravation of what
in Ancient Criticism could hardly be called with justice a fault at all,
though it was even there a serious defect—the absence, that is to
say, of a wide enough collection of instances from the past, and of
an elastic and tolerant system of trial and admission for the present
and future. We may now[746] use the word “fault” almost without
qualification, proviso, or apology. The Greek could not, and the
Roman until very late days could only to a most limited extent,
exercise the proper sweep of observation and comparison; the man
of the earlier Middle Ages was, from different causes, prevented
from doing so to any effect. But the contemporaries of Lilius Giraldus
who knew (or knew of) Chaucer and Wyatt—still more, in the next
generation, those of Patrizzi who knew Ronsard and the Pléiade—
could plead no such exemption or excuse. They had recovered the
exacter knowledge of the remoter past which the Middle Ages
lacked, the critical spirit which during the Middle Ages was asleep:
and they had accumulated and were accumulating treasures, of
completed mediæval work and of modern work constantly accruing,
enough to give them every comparison, without exception, that they
could have wanted. Their guilt was deepening daily as their
opportunities increased.
For they neglected these opportunities, they “sinned” these
mercies, almost without exception. If England in any way deserved
the good fortune that fell to her at the close of the eighteenth
century and the beginning of the nineteenth, it was because she had
never wholly denied either Chaucer or Spenser, either Shakespeare
or Milton. But the just men who thus saved her were wofully few,
and they were almost all of them followers of Naaman, who extorted
a permission to bow in the house of Rimmon, rather than of the
glorious Three Children, who would do obeisance to no graven
image that any king set up. If Germany had the honour of leading
the way—or very nearly leading the way—in the Critical Reformation,
it was because, from the very beginning of her really modern
literature, she had put faith in her Heldenbuch and her Bergreihen.
But even this faith was rather hesitating for a long time, and it had
no foothold in courtly, and curial, and academic places. The men
who were the real pioneers in the revival or commencement of that
universal study of literature which alone can lead to a universal
criticism, were as a rule mere scholars and antiquaries, men like
Oldys and Capell, La Monnoye and Sainte-Palaye, Sanchez and
Sedano. Gray, the greatest man of letters by far who at least
fumbled with the key of the enchanted garden, did but fumble with
that key: and his successors Percy and Warton, who opened what
they could, were not great men of letters at all. Abroad, and
especially in France, their analogues, such as Marmontel, never got
so far even as they did. In Spain it became fashionable to deny Lope
if not Cervantes: in Italy Dante-worship was too often, if not in most
cases, lip-worship only.
The spectacle of these centuries is almost infinitely interesting and
surprising. I cannot, after having, with not a little pains, attained to
some Pisgah-sight of it, exhaust my own wonder, especially in regard
to the Eighteenth, or disentangle myself from that fatalism which I
have already—with the result of some misunderstanding in the
house of no un-friends—announced at the end of the First volume.
We can understand the Sixteenth century, with its vernaculars hardly
yet fully formed, with their greatest literature coming and to come,
with an almost excusable distaste for the immediate past, and with
the full eagerness—the honeymoon intoxication—of their intercourse
with the classics upon them—we can understand this being
excessive in admitting, in continuing, in caricaturing, the critical
principles of the classics themselves. We can also, if not quite so
fully, understand how the dwindling enthusiasms of the Seventeenth,
with its still greater sense of “the petty done, the undone vast” in
the matter of mere erudition, and its thick-coming concerns of party
politics, material progress, physical science, rivalry of nations, and
the like—we can understand its sinking, in mid-journey or
thereabouts, to an “age of prose and sense,” where the prose was as
certain as the sense was sometimes problematical. But the
Eighteenth was beginning to be disengaged, to specialise, to take
stock, to disuse the Chronicle and begin the History. How, we must
ask ourselves, could men like Muratori and Gravina, like Addison and
Johnson, like Fontenelle and Du Bos, rest even partly satisfied (for
wholly, as we have seen, some of them at least were not) with
literary sealed patterns which admittedly would not fit the greatest
admitted literature of all their respective countries except France,
and which presented, to the not insufficient self-sufficiency of
Frenchmen, the proposition that, for hundreds of years, French men
of letters had been barbarians, if not idiots?
There is no explanation but Grandgousier’s, eked a little by the
remembrance that—as we shall, it is to be hoped, see in the next
volume—there was a searching of hearts, a moving of the waters,
not very late, in fact very early, in the Eighteenth century itself. But,
as we have seen already, the creed of the majority, the orthodoxy of
the time, admitted no hint of this. It made a few concessions or
extensions—till it found them obviously unsafe—in the direction of
amiable but illogical compromise in particulars. It yielded up no jot
of the general creed. It was still matter of breviary circa 1780, as it
had begun to be circa 1580, that the Fable was the Poem (let us say
that if Homer had written an argument of the Iliad, and had left off
there, he would have done all that was actually necessary); that you
must follow Nature by following the ancients; that you must not use
epic verse in non-epic poetry, and so forth. In all countries, or
almost all,—the extreme literary poverty and disarray of Germany
here serving her in good stead,—these general assumptions, and the
many others which have been noticed in the foregoing pages, had
narrowed down to yet others of the particular kind—that the pause
in an English verse must be absolutely within a syllable or two of the
middle; that a French Alexandrine must not have the impudence to
overflow into its neighbour; and the like. And the whole sums itself
up all the more strikingly—because of the doubtful and
argumentative tone of the passage—in that memorable decision of
Johnson’s which has been discussed above, the decision justifying
Rymer, justifying La Harpe, that we must not “judge by the event,”—
that the presence of the fig is no proof of the nature of the fig-tree.
No very elaborate indications of the faults inseparable from this
style of criticism can be necessary. That if carried out rigorously (as
in some instances at least it was) it would simply have sterilised and
petrified the literary production of the world, is of course obvious.
That journey au fond de l’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau, which,
with whatever success or failure it may meet, however dangerous it
may be in some high functions and departments of Life and
Thought, is the motive principle of Art, was barred by it at once. It
was no question of “progress” in the very likely chimerical sense of
improvement; there was to be not even any difference. “To-morrow”
was not, according to the proverb, to be “a new day”: if the men of
this school did not go as far as Musette and pronounce that Demain,
c’est une fatuité du calendrier, they held that it was to be as
yesterday, and much more also. It is equally obvious that this
doctrine positively invited indulgence in some of the worst faults of
criticism. The critic who nowadays compasses all the reference
shelves of the British Museum in order to find one discrepancy with
his author, and then triumphs over him, is mostly confined to dates
and names, or to more or less transparent erections of personal
opinion (or personal ignorance) into standards, which the fairly
intelligent reader takes for what they are worth. A hundred and fifty
years ago the child of Momus had much better cards in his hand.
The “exact scales of Bossu” were not only infinitely complicated and
elaborate, but people in general, however intelligent, were by no
means inclined to find any fault with them or question their justice.
He had a hundred chances, to one that he now has, of catching his
author tripping under statute, and without any actual garbling or
dishonesty.
But between the dangers on the great scale and the dangers on
the small, which have been indicated in the last paragraph, there
were many of intermediate kinds. Without absolute distrust of
novelty or unfamiliarity as such on the one hand, and without a
mere peddling tendency to pick holes on the other, a critic under this
dispensation might, and almost must, find himself distracted,
hampered, wellnigh mantrapped, in his critical investigations. A
dreamlike network or chain of obsessions was upon him. To submit
himself frankly to the effect of the work and judge it as he would a
prospect or a picture,[747] a vintage or a face, was forbidden him. It
was his duty, in the first place, if the author openly classed his work
in any Kind, to decide whether it really belonged to this or to
another; if the author had omitted that ceremony, to determine the
classification sedulously for himself. Then he had to remember, or
look up, the most celebrated ancient examples of the Kind, or those
modern ones which had obtained the credit of being most like the
ancients; and to decide whether the resemblance was sufficient in
general. And then he had to descend—if descent be possible in this
process of grovelling—to particulars, and see if they were “according
to Cocker.” If everything were entirely en règle, he was at liberty to
admire and enjoy, supposing that, after the preliminaries, he had
any disposition towards admiration and enjoyment left in him.
This is not a caricature; it is absolutely exact according to the
“regulation” theory: and as the examples quoted before will have
shown, and as hundreds of others might be produced to show, it is
by no means untrue to practice. A critic, great, or generous, or
happily both, might transcend his brief, be better than his creed, as
in that noble eulogy of Gray’s Elegy which makes up for much in
Johnson’s Life of the poet. But these were works of supererogation;
and it is not quite certain that the exercise of them was entirely
orthodox. The “stop-watch” was orthodox: it was the very centre
and pulse of the machine of neo-classic criticism.
I do not think that it is part of my duty as a Historian to support
this view by any further argument. I have given the strongest
possible, in a minute, and I believe faithful, exposition of the actual
survey, the actual opinions, the actual processes and judgments of
neo-classic critics. If it is necessary to say any more, let it be this
only. The weakness of their position is sufficiently shown by the fact
that it could not bear the light of a historical knowledge of literature.
There was none such, so long as it lasted: and when that light
shone, it fell. The coincidences may not be causative; but it is for
others to show that they are not.
If, however, any one should conclude from these strictures that, in
the view of the present writer, the critical work of these three
centuries was only evil continually, he would make a very great
mistake. Moreover, putting all personal views out of the question, it
is certain that this could not be the case. In almost all arts and even
sciences, but in Art even more than in Science, the task set before
the human faculties is a gigantic “Rule of False,” as the older
arithmetic books called it, in which, by following out certain
hypotheses, and ascertaining how and to what extent you are led
wrong by them, you at last discover the right way. The most
grotesque error is thus a benefit to Humanity, which, indeed,
sometimes shows itself conscious enough of the beneficial character
to perform the experiment over and over again. And further, in all
arts and in all sciences, but especially in the higher division of Art,
the reward of these excursions is not confined to the somewhat
negative advantage of discovering that man need go that way no
more. Corollaries and episodes—wayside windfalls of the Muses—
await, not so thinly spread, the adventurous and single-hearted
practitioner of Allegory as of Alchemy, on the acrostic as on the
astrolabe. And considering the secondary or parasitic character
which so specially belongs to Criticism, it is inevitable, not merely
that these “bonuses,” these “extras,” should be more abundant here
than anywhere else, but that the regular profits of the ordinary work
should be considerable. Unless the critic is utterly incompetent and
bad—unless he is a very Rymer, I do not say a Dennis, much less a
Boileau—his mere contact with a new work of art must result in
something useful, in a critical datum and fact for the future. It is
very unlikely—if he is a person of even rather more than average
brains it is practically impossible—that the exact equation or
conjunction of his temperament, and his equipment, and the
character of the work, will ever recur. It is, ex hypothesi, quite
certain that it can never have occurred before. That he judges under
a certain system, even a wrong one, will not detract from the value
of the result, save in quantity. There will still be the actual fact—
acquired to the stock of critical data for the future—that a critical
power, say A, applied under the restrictions of system m or n, to
work B, has resulted in the judgment x. And this result, in its own
line and sphere, is as much a “thing,” and a thing of interest, to the
critical student of literature, as a new beetle to the man of science,
or a new judgment of the House of Lords to the man of law. Nay, to
such a student it has a higher interest still: it is in rank and line
(mutatis mutandis again) with the work criticised, with a picture,
with a sonata, as a thing of art itself.
And critics in these centuries, from these points of view and
others, estated criticism more richly than it could have hoped to be
endowed when the Humanists began once more to attack and
defend Poetry, or when Daniello a little later set himself down to
write the first treatise of criticism proper in a vernacular language.
They attempted, and to the best of their power arranged, the more
general questions of the Art, always with zeal, if not always with
discretion; they did valuable, if also somewhat and sometimes
mistaken, work in its intermediate regions; and slowly, grudgingly,
but surely, they set themselves to the apparently humbler but really
fruitful work of actual critical examination of literature, at first as it
had been provided and already criticised long ago, at last as it was
being provided by the flying day. Their own theories, right or wrong,
they worked out with altogether admirable patience and
thoroughness, applying them, too, with a faithfulness which must
excite admiration, if it cannot command agreement. And, as we have
taken all fair pains to show, they not unfrequently strayed and
stumbled upon outside truths, leant over the border of their
somewhat narrow world and pried into others, after a fashion which,
when the due time came, was sure to start more adventurous
discoverers on wider paths of exploration.
It would be superfluous to extend this already long volume with
any list of selected specimens of individual achievement and
excellence. I hope, indeed, that this book may attract or help
attention to some critics—Capriano, Cinthio, Patrizzi, Ogier are a very
few examples—who are at present very little known: and to others,
unnecessary to specify, whose claims have, as it seems to me, been
underrated or misunderstood. But I have included, I think, no one of
all the hundreds appearing in this volume who is not profitable in
some way, for example, or for correction, or for reproof—who has
not done something, if it be only in the way of warning, to help the
student of all time.
We may also advantageously compare this balance-sheet with the
balance-sheets of Ancient Criticism as given before, and of Modern
in an anticipated draft. As compared with the former, Neo-Classicism
has the disadvantage that, with at least equal if not greater
narrowness, it is almost entirely destitute of the same excuse for
being narrow. The Greeks of the great age wrote with nothing but
Greek literature before them; those of the decadence and the
Romans with nothing but Greek literature and Roman, which was for
the most part a pale copy of Greek. The men of the eighteenth
century, had they chosen, could have compared, with the practice
and the theory of these two literatures, not merely the vast, the
interesting, and, as “correcting” classicism, the inestimable literature
of the Middle Ages, but at least four substantive and important
literatures of modern times, those of France, Italy, England, and
Spain. They not only did not do this as a matter of fact, but they
invariably in practice, and not seldom as a matter of express theory,
flouted and scouted the bare idea of doing it. They persisted in
applying a travesty of the system of Horace, itself travestied from
Aristotle, to these totally different products. Sometimes this resulted
in the bland absurdity of the Battle of the Books attitude, sometimes
in the hardly less ludicrous compromise which, by stretching the
faults-and-beauties doctrine to its farthest possible extent, allowed
critics to make room, as it were by sufferance, for Shakespeare and
Milton, for Dante and Cervantes. They could laugh heartily at a
dinner in the style of the ancients, and their common-sense would at
once have pronounced any one fit for Bedlam who attempted to
journey from London to York bareheaded, clothed in a toga, and
with sandals on foot; but in theory, and even partly in practice, they
imposed the classical uniform on literature.
Still, they show, at least in some respects, better beside their
modern successors than it is the fashion to think. We have opened
the road which they barred, and permitted the exploration of the
countries which they forbade; but it is rather a question whether we
have profited as we should by this gain. It is still the very rarest
thing to find a critic who, by equipment or even by inclination, is
himself disposed to take a really catholic view of literature; and
those who do endeavour to take such a view are constantly
regarded with distrust by the general, and with a rather comic
rancour by specialists. It follows that the modern critic is, taking
each on his own scheme, very much less well prepared as a rule
than the critic, not merely of the eighteenth century, as has been
said above, but of our period generally, and very nearly as liable as
that critic was to take hasty sweeping views in condemnation of
whole provinces of his subject.
Excesses, moreover, of this kind, which critics from the
Renaissance onwards committed, are a natural result of reaction in
all histories. And in the History of Literature a hundred years of
something approaching to Anarchy are perhaps not too much to
balance three hundred of mistakenly experimental Order. We shall
see the causes and the faults, as well as the excuses and the gains,
of the Anarchy later. For the present it is fitting to conclude, with an
acknowledgment anew of the merits of the Order also, in respect to
the faults of which we have been so frank. They are the merits of a
remarkable industry, of a commendable freedom from mere
dilettantism, of the discovery of not a few sound critical principles,
and the registration of not a few sound critical judgments, of an
experimentation and accomplishment which, even if it went wrong,
serves as an invaluable warning to other ages not to pursue the
paths which have so misled. And, yet once more, let us recognise
that adjustment of criticism to creation—mysterious or simply natural
as it may seem to different temperaments and different systems of
thought—which we have observed before, in the cautious check of
Renaissance criticism on the heady exuberance of the great
Renaissance creation, in the support given by Seventeenth-century
classicism to such mediate powers and dispositions as those of
Corneille and even Racine, of Dryden and even Pope; in the salutary
deterrence of Eighteenth-century orthodoxy, which saved us from
more Beatties and more Anne Radcliffes when the time was not
ready for Keatses or for Scotts. For so also in literature—and even in
that, as some would have it, not divinest part of literature, Criticism
—do all the works of the Lord, the lesser as well as the greater,
praise Him and magnify Him for ever.
711. My copy is the Naples edition of 1732. But the book had
appeared some four-and-twenty years earlier at Rome (some even
quote a Roman ed. of 1704).
717. Gravina calls the opposite style to Macaronic not, as most do,
pedantesco, but Fidenziano, from Fidentio, the nom de guerre of
Camillo Scrofa, author of certain egregious pedantesque pieces.
722. I shall own frankly that, when I first read this, I had either
never heard of Arthur Kelton, or had utterly forgotten him, and
thought the name must be a muddle of “Skelton.” What is known
about him may be found in Warton, iv. 159, ed. Hazlitt (taken, as
was probably Quadrio’s knowledge of him, from Wood and Bale),
and also in the Dictionary of National Biography. According to the
latter, his poem in praise of the Welsh nation is not now extant or
discoverable; and though a Chronicle exists I have never seen it.
What made the Jesuit name Kelton at all is as dark to me as what
made him transform Gower and “Wicherley” into “Melic” bards.
724. It fills the greater part of the 12th and last vol. of the Paris
ed. (1782). The passages quoted are at pp. 29, 30, and 57 of this.
730. P. 333.
732. One of the most important works of the Swiss school itself is
Bodmer’s Sammlung Kritischer Schriften, 1741, but this is for
another time. Nicolai’s Bibliothek der Schönen Wissenschaften
(Berlin, 1757) and Literaturbriefe (ibid., 1759-66) perhaps show the
movement best.
735. My copy is the third edition, Leipsic, 1742. The first is, I
think, of 1730.
740. Thus we are to divide the Wonderful in Poetry (p. 171) into
three parts—like omnis Gallia! One may hesitate whether to emend
“three thousand” or “three million.”
742. In the 7th vol. (pp. 117-154) of his Works, 10 vols., Berne,
1774-75.
(Dates in the following entries are only given in the case of critical
writers actually belonging to the period dealt with in the volume. To
economise space, also, the kind of writing practised is only indicated
where confusion is possible.)
Cæsar, 152.
Calcagnini, Celio, 62.
Calderon, de la Barca, &c., Pedro (1600-81), 349.
Callières, François de (1645-1717), 450.
Camoens, 497 note, 516, 553 note.
Campbell, George (1709-96), 470-473.
Campion, Thomas (?-1619), 187-189, 199, 366.
Camusat, Denis François (1695-1732), 551 note.
Canons of Criticism, the, 497 note.
Capell, 569.
Caporali, Cesare (1531-1601), 344 note, 347 note.
Capriano, G. P. (fl. c. 1550), 47, 48, 219.
Caprice au Seig. S. Nicolas, 129 sq.
“Car of Cambridge”—i.e., Carr, Nicholas (1524-68), Greek Professor?
193.
Caractères, Les, 301 sq.
Carlyle, Mr, 526.
Caro, Annibale (1507-66), 49, 91.
Carvallo, Louis Alfonso de (fl. c. 1600), 341.
Cascales, Francisco (?-1640), 338.
Castelvetro, Lodovico (1505-71), 17, 22 note, 31 note, 57, 80-89, 90,
91, 101, 215, 219, 233, 244 note, 265, 273 note, 326, 331, 341.
Castiglione, 93.
Castle of Indolence, the, 495.
Catiline, Rymer on, 396.
Catullus, 45, 81, 531.
Caxton, William (1442?-91?), 145.
Celtes, Conrad, 28.
Cervantes, Miguel de (1547-1616), 347-349.
Chamfort, Sebastien Roch Nicolas (1741-94), 534 note.
Champfleury, 110 note, 135.
Chapelain, Jean (1595-1674), 249 note, 252, 256-261, 297, 387
note, 393, 417.
Chapman, 199, 384, 387.
Character of Saint-Evremond, 271, 385 note.
Chaucer, 6, 63 and note, 146 sq., 150, 158 sq., 179 sq., 388, 390,
393, 438, 561.
Cheke, Sir John (1514-57), 148, 151-153.
Chénier, M. J., 525 note.
Chester, Thomas, 6.
Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694-1773), 476 note, 514
note.
Chevræana, 274 note.
Chevy Chase, 173, 443.
Choice, the, 488.
Christopher North, 496.
Christus Patiens, 357 note.
Churchill, 517.
Cicero, 11, 12, 40, 48 and note, 53 note, 59, 150, 471.
Ciceronianus, 10-12, 193, 276.
Cid, the, and the censure on it, 257 sq.
Cigarrales de Toledo, 332, 342, 343.
Cinna, 379.
Cinthio Giraldi, Giambattista (1504-73), 58-62, 81, 84, 90-92, 101,
214, 219.
Cisne de Apolo, 341.
Citizen of the World, the, 498.
“Classical Metres,” 157 sq.
Claudian, 384, 405.
Claveret, 258 note.
Cleveland, 235, 377, 387, 421.
Cœlius Rhodiginus, 405.
Coleridge, 52, 145, 202, 532.
Colet, John (1467-1513), 15, 63.
Colletet family, 286 and note.
Collier, Jeremy (1650-1726), 392, 402-404, 433 sq., 451.
Collins (the poet), 490 sq.
Colloquies of Erasmus, the, 11, 13, 14.
“Columbarius, Julius,” 346.
Comical Gallant, the, 434.
Comparaisons, Rapin’s, 310 sq.
Comus, 490.
Conceptismo, 350.
Concio, sive Merdardus, 13.
Condorcet, M. J. A. N. Caritat, Marquis de (1743-94), 525 note.
Conflictus Thaliæ et Barbariei, 13.
Congreve, 403.
Conrart, Valentin (1603-75), 240, 278.
Conti, Armand de Bourbon, Prince de (1629-66), 402 note.
Conversations with Drummond, 198 sq.
Convivium Poeticum, 13.
Cook, Prof. A. S., 30.
Cooper’s Hill, 375, 500.
Corneille, Pierre (1606-84), 54, 258, 261-264, 297, 304, 378 sq.,
419, 504 sq., 522.
—— Voltaire’s Commentary on, 516.
—— Thomas (1625-1706), 316 note.
Correa, L. (fl. c. 1590), 107.
Costar, Pierre (1603-60), 278.
Cotin, Charles, Abbé (1604-82), 282, 287 note, 297.
Cours de Littérature, 530 sq.
Courthope, Mr, 444 note, 453 note.
Courtier, the, 93.
Cowley, Abraham (1618-67), 366, 367, 393, 404, 438, 439, 450,
481, 488 sq.
Cowper, 87, 476 note.
Coxe, Leonard, 148 note.
Craik, Sir Henry, 398 note.
Crashaw, Pope on, 453 note.
Crébillon, Fils, 536 note.
Creed, attempted summary of the Neo-Classic, 216, 217.
Crescimbeni, Giovanni Maria (1663-1728), 218 note, 324, 542. 324,
542.
Crinitus, Petrus (Pietro Riccio, 1465-1505), 27.
Critical Review, the, 497.
Croy, Henri de, 110.
Crusca, Ac. della, 92 sq.
Culteranismo, 346 sq.
Cultismo, 346 sq.
Cursor Mundi, 230.
Cynthia’s Revels, 198 note.
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