RENAISSANCE
LITERARY THEORY
AND PRACTICE

Renaissance Literary
Theory and Practice

Classicism in the Rhetoric and Poetic
Of Italy, France, and England
1400-1600

By
CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN

Edited with Introduction by
DONALD LEMEN CLARK

GLOUCESTER, MASS.
PETER SMITH
1959

Copyright, 1939
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Reprinted, 1959
By Permission of
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

BEATO THOMAE MORO
JVDICI
CVI STILVM ANGLICVM
LATINE REGENTI
PERSTABAT IN REGIA
QVAESTIONE PAX ROMANA

INTRODUCTION

When he died in 1936 Charles Sears Baldwin, Professor of Rhetoric and English Composition at Columbia University, left the unpublished manuscript which here appears in print. At the request of his family, I undertook to prepare the manuscript for publication and see it through the press. As a devoted student, colleague, and friend I have been happy to do so.

Baldwin’s Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice takes its place as the continuation of his previously published studies: Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic (1924) and Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (1928), both published by the Macmillan Company. It takes up the story where Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic left off in 1400 and carries it on to 1600.

The first sentences of his preface to the first study suggest that Baldwin had the present study in mind before 1924. “To interpret ancient rhetoric and poetic afresh from typical theory and practice is the first step toward interpreting those traditions of criticism which were most influential in the Middle Age. Medieval rhetoric and poetic, in turn, prepare for a clearer comprehension of the Renaissance renewal of allegiance to antiquity.”

Like the two earlier studies, it is firmly based on the Aristotelian philosophy of composition embodied in the Rhetoric and the Poetic. Baldwin adheres to the sound rhetoric which aims at enhancing the subject and repudiates the sophistic rhetoric which aims at enhancing the speaker. Rhetoric and poetic are different in aim and different in their modes of composition. Consequently he considers poetic deviated when it becomes confused with rhetoric and perverted when controlled by sophistic.

Had he lived, Baldwin would have written more than here appears. He had planned a chapter on Renaissance education which would have demonstrated more fully the channels through which poetical theory reached poetical practice. In the chapter “Sixteenth Century Poetics” he had planned sections on Castelvetro and Sibillet which were never written. Other writers on literary theory he deliberately omitted as less typical, less significant, or less influential than the writers he discusses. His method was to go directly to the original sources, both for theory and for practice, to make his own translations, and to ignore secondary sources, which he rarely cites.

Although Chapters IV, V, VI, and VIII deal with literary forms: lyric, pastoral, romance, drama, tales, history, and essay, Baldwin was not attempting a history of Italian, French, and English literature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. To have written such a history would have involved a completeness he never intended. He was assaying samples of literature for literary values. Especially was he tracing the influences of sound literary theory on sound literary practice, and the disastrous results in literature of the misapplication of rhetorical theory to poetic and the composition of story and drama. As literary critic and teacher of composition, he saw no good reason why modern literature, in theory or in practice, should make the same mistakes that were made in ancient times, the Middle Age, and the Renaissance. He believed that modern literature, modern criticism, and modern teaching should learn from the mistakes of others as well as from their own.

Before Baldwin’s death I had read the manuscript in two states as I had the two earlier works. Further, the manuscript was read and criticized by Dr. Caroline Ruutz-Rees of Rosemary Hall and Professor William G. Crane of The College of the City of New York. To these friends, and to the others whose aid I have been unable to discover, the author’s and the editor’s gratitude is due. Professor Marshall Whithed Baldwin, son of Charles Sears Baldwin, read both the galley and the page proofs. My colleagues, Professors Harry Morgan Ayres and Nelson Glenn McCrea, advised on the proofs and other details. I join with the Baldwin estate in gratitude to the generous assistance of the officers and editorial staff of the Columbia University Press.

Donald Lemen Clark

Columbia University
September, 1939

CONTENTS

RENAISSANCE
LITERARY THEORY
AND PRACTICE

Chapter I
THE RENAISSANCE AS A LITERARY PERIOD

The word renaissance suggests a state of mind, the sense of recovering something neglected by one’s literary ancestors. “Ours is a new day,” says the fifteenth century. “We have escaped from the decadence of our fathers into the purer poetry. We have recovered the great tradition and are setting it forward.” So the English eighteenth century, which had again repudiated “gothic night,” was in turn repudiated in the manifesto of the Lyrical Ballads and scorned by Keats as “a schism nourished in foppery and barbarism.” The Renaissance, then, is it only one such instance of self-consciousness among the many that mark so-called periods of literature? The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were regarded not only at the time, but long and widely, as an actual new day, the Renaissance. Histories of literature, no less than those of politics and society, have treated it as a distinct period. Though more recent histories have found it less distinct, it still claims attention as a widespread cult of the ancient classics. Its leading ideas permeated western Europe; and its new day, though it was bent toward nationalism, was conceived but secondarily as national progress, primarily as a general reanimation from ancient ideals long neglected. Thus it is not only the most familiar example of a typical recurrence in literary history; it remains the cardinal experience of classicism. Though we may no longer speak of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a reawakening of literature equal to that of painting, we may still speak of the Renaissance.

The common sixteenth-century view of accomplished restoration after medieval decadence is expressed (1527) by Guillaume Budé.

The best part, I think, we now have in our hands, saved from the deluge of more than a thousand years; for a deluge indeed, calamitous to life, had so drained and absorbed literature itself and the kindred arts worthy of the name, and kept them so dismantled and buried in barbarian mud that it was a wonder they could still exist (De studio literarum, 1527; Basel ed. 1533).

In 1558 the sober Minturno is merely less certain as to dates.

For who of you is unaware that from the time when the Roman Empire, for all its power and eminence, began to totter and lean, literature was asleep, not to say overwhelmed and buried, till the time of Petrarch? From then on, it has been so steadily regaining the light that now it has been almost recalled from that [medieval] rude and barbarous teaching to its ancient cult (De poeta, 1559, p. 14).

The Poetica (1561) of Julius Caesar Scaliger surprised no one by bringing the history of Latin poetry to date without even mentioning the Middle Age. He might include his own poems; he need not include the medieval hymns. Scorn of the Middle Age was a Renaissance literary commonplace. The history of literature has to be rewritten from age to age, first to satisfy such prejudices, then to dispel them. The art that survives these reinterpretations, the books or the paintings that still compel admiration and study, are vindicated, whatever their period, as classics. Meantime the perception of these has been repeatedly obscured both by preoccupation with some idealized great period and by pride in one’s own time.

What, then, has the longer perspective of history shown to be the literary progress of the Middle Age and the distinctive direction of the Renaissance? Two answers have been found in the fourteenth-century borderland: (1) the culmination of medieval development in the literary triumph of the vernaculars, and (2) the beginning of a new literary influence in the revival of Greek. Two more belong to the fifteenth century: (3) the vogue of that humanistic Latin which rejected the medieval freedom for conformity to the style of an idealized great period, and (4) the establishment of printing.

The literary triumph of the vernaculars is forecast in Dante. The supreme achievement of the Divina Commedia is eloquent at once of the Middle Age and of the literary future. The vogue of Boccaccio and the wider influence of Petrarch were not of their Latin, but of their vernacular writings. The traditional superiority of Latin, indeed, as the language of literature not only lingered; it was upheld by humanism; but the tradition had gradually to yield to the facts. The fourteenth century closed with the convincing achievement of Chaucer in English. To French also, though individual eminence was less, the century promised the literary future. The long medieval course of Latin had reached its term. The new literary day was for the new languages. None the less that new day was medieval, not merely in date, but in being the culmination of a medieval progress. The language of literature, medieval experience had learned, must be the language of communication. So it had long been in Latin; so it had become, within medieval conditions, in Tuscan, French, and English. No subsequent change through Greek, or humanistic Latin, or even printing, more affected the outlook and direction of literature than the medieval rise of the vernaculars from literary acceptance to literary eminence.

Greek, generally in abeyance through most of the Middle Age, was studied by both Petrarch and Boccaccio and had its professor at Florence in 1396. Its spread in the fifteenth century was stimulated both by the movement for the reunion of the “Greek” Church with Rome and by the influx of Greek scholars after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. But it never threatened the traditional eminence of Latin. Renaissance literary dialogues were less often Platonic in form than Ciceronian; and the direct influence of Theocritus on revived pastoral is hard to distinguish from the indirect influence through the Bucolics of Vergil. Still more important to remember is that Greek influence, direct or indirect, stopped short of Greek composition. Greek dramaturgy, perhaps the cardinal Greek influence on later times, remained ineffective in the Renaissance. The Poetic of Aristotle did not oust the “Ars poetica” of Horace. Slowly grasped, Greek dramaturgy hardly shaped plays before the seventeenth century. The sixteenth century was still repeating Horace and following Seneca or carrying on the experience of the miracle plays or learning by stage experiment. Nor was verse narrative, even when called epic, attentive to the Aristotelian doctrine of sequence. The integration of Tasso’s Jerusalem, which found its model in the Aeneid, is quite exceptional. The manuscripts circulating in the fourteenth century and the early fifteenth, as well as the texts later printed, show as ready a welcome for the decadent Greek literature of Alexandria as for the great names of Athens. With Homer came in not only the Anthology, but even those “Greek romances” which are aggregations of melodrama. The Renaissance vogue of Plato involved from its beginning the cultivation of the neo-Platonists. On the other hand, Greek added to higher education a language experience that held its place for some three hundred years and was expected of all scholars.

Renaissance scorn of the Middle Age was not merely a general complacency; it was especially a repudiation of the freedom of medieval Latin. Latin style must conform to the habits of its great period; and this restoration was a prime object of Renaissance classicism. In 1472 Guillaume Fichet, scholar and rhetorician, wrote to another rhetorician, Robert Gaguin:

I feel the greatest satisfaction, most learned Robert, in the flourishing here at Paris, where they used to be unknown, of poetic compositions and all the parts of eloquence. For when in my youth I first left the Baux country to study at Paris the learning of Aristotle, I used to be much astonished at finding so rarely in all Paris an orator and a poet. No one was studying Cicero night and day as many do now. No one knew how to write verse correctly or to scan the verse of others. For the school of Paris, having lost the habit of Latinity, had hardly emerged from ignorance in the field of discourse. But from our days dates a better epoch; for the gods, to speak poetically, and the goddesses are reviving among us the art of speaking well.[1]

In 1476 Lorenzo Valla prefaced a manual widely current in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, De elegantia linguae latinae, with his shame at medieval Latin and his confidence in the restoration.

But as I would say more, I am choked and inflamed by grief, compelled to weep as I behold from what estate and to what estate eloquence has fallen. For what lover of letters or of the public weal could restrain his tears at seeing it debased as when Rome was captured by the Gauls: everything so overturned, burned, dislocated that hardly survives even the very citadel? These many centuries not only has no one spoken Latin aright, but no one reading it has understood; the books of the ancients have not been grasped and are not grasped now; as if with the loss of the Roman Empire had been lost all pride in speaking and knowing Roman, and the splendor of Latinity, faded by mould and rust, were forgotten.... But the less happy were those former times which produced no single scholar, the more we may congratulate our own times, in which, if we but strive a little further, I am confident that not only the Roman city, but still more the Roman language, and with it all liberal studies, shall be restored.

The Middle Age, then, could not write Latin. Not John of Salisbury, not Dante, not even Aquinas was really eruditus! Fifty years later the judicious Bembo reports the restoration as accomplished.

Latin has so far been purged of the rust of the untaught centuries that today it has regained its ancient splendor and charm.[2]

Renaissance classicism thus ignored the medieval Latin progress. This deliberate breaking with the past could not, indeed, stop the sun; but it did put back the hands of the clock. The humanistic cult of Augustan Latin as a literary norm widely affected all language study. Though its literary achievement has faded in the perspective of history, its literary experience has permanent significance.

The rapid diffusion of printing in the late fifteenth century was a change of so wide and deep consequence to literature as to become a revolution. The suddenly increased and rapidly increasing availability of books was by itself enough to make a renaissance. Further it gave their role to the great publishers: Aldus, Gryphius, the Juntas, Froben, the Étiennes, Plantin. But one of the first effects of printing was to prolong or widen the influence of books characteristically medieval: Boethius and Bede, Alain de Lille, Aquinas, Hugh of St Victor. With Geoffrey of Monmouth were printed such romances as Mélusine and Pontus and the Fair Sidoine. Even Merlin was resuscitated. Neither Ariosto for his Carolingians nor Spenser for his Arthurians needed manuscript sources. Moreover the presses answered continuing demand for the Golden Legend and for such typically medieval compends as that of Petrus Comestor, the Speculum of Vincent of Beauvais, and even the Etymologiae of Isidore. They brought out not only the greater Cicero, recovered in 1422, but also the elder Seneca, Lucan, Aulus Gellius, Statius, Ausonius, Claudian, Sidonius, the medieval favorites. They multiplied for schools Donatus and Priscian, Diomedes and Martianus Capella. The collection entitled Auctores (or Actores) octo set before boys the De contemptu mundi, the Tobias of Matthieu de Vendôme, an Isopet and Cathonet, and the Proverbia of Alain de Lille. The hackneyed De inventione, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the hardy perennial “Ars poetica” of Horace had new lease of life. Medieval courtly verse forms, especially the balade, though scorned by Du Bellay and Ronsard, persisted not only with Villon, but in the huge printed collection of 1501, Le Jardin de plaisance. One of the first effects of printing was to prolong the Middle Age.

If the recovery of Greek, then, and even the establishment of printing, did not upset historical continuity, what of the lapse of feudalism? The most picturesque scene of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was such a ducal court as that of Urbino, Mantua, or Ferrara. Its lavish splendor broke from the ruins of feudalism. It was a triumph of individual violence amid the dislocation of medieval loyalties. This type of court, established and maintained by such professional soldiers as Sir John Hawkwood, became in Elizabethan imaginations a proverb at once of magnificence and of ruthlessness. Macchiavelli’s realistic statesmanship was interpreted as diabolic; and Italian dukes were staged with daggers and poison. Though this foreign prejudice and exaggeration were largely melodrama, the court poets themselves hint at actual ruthlessness in contrast to their idealized Carolingian chivalry. Boiardo made the romantic literary escape frankly; and even Ariosto felt its spell. So Sir Thomas Malory, who needed no lessons in violence from Italy, escapes from the bitter Wars of the Roses to Camelot. So a French professional soldier is idealized as the Chevalier Bayard. With feudal service already obsolete in the fourteenth century, chivalry had become altogether what it had always been in part, poetry. There, indeed, was a breach with the Middle Age; and it is earliest and clearest in Italy. The ducal court is distinct both from the idealized castle of the medieval romances and from the actual castle of the Middle Age.

Patrons of painters and architects, the ducal courts had also their orators and their poets. The orators had the more distinct function of furnishing on occasion ceremonious letters and addresses; they might be secretaries and sometimes librarians. The poets devised the characteristic Renaissance pageants for the solemn entries of distinguished visitors or triumphing dukes. Both were spokesmen in obituary, in nuptial greeting, in other encomium. The pervasive encomium of the Renaissance may have been directly stimulated by the ducal courts. How important they were as literary centers is more difficult to determine. Having a poet or an orator on the premises has not always constituted a literary center. In some cases the courts may have fostered literature less than they added it to their own adornment; in some cases a court poet might feel himself rather thwarted than stimulated. At least they were important enough to become literary fictions. The setting of one of the most characteristic and influential dialogues of the Renaissance, Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1528) is the court of Urbino. Idealized of course, this fixed the type of gracious culture which offsets Macchiavelli’s realism and the Elizabethan melodrama of lust and murder. The very name of the book has literary significance. No single word is more characteristic of Renaissance literature than courtier. In its wider sense it describes not only Ariosto and Tasso, but also Ronsard and Spenser.

The more permanent literary center of the period of rapid commercial expansion was first Florence, where the new commercial aristocracy lived cheek by jowl with the bourgeoisie; then Lyon, commercial for a thousand years, literary outpost of Italy in France. These are cardinal examples of the intellectual interests and achievements stirred in Venice, Bruges, London, and the other commercial cities, by trade and printing. In Medicean Florence social eminence demanded not only some interest in the arts, but some acquaintance with them. Nicolao Nicoli, merchant and scholar, was connoisseur enough to see at a glance that the chalcedony on a boy’s neck was a “Policreto.” The ideal of educated taste and skill set up by Castiglione for Urbino is no less clear among the merchant princes and their courtiers in Florence. The great Cosimo dei Medici commissions Vespasiano to make him a library worthy of his position, though he is daringly reminded that libraries should not be made to order. In Venice Minturno addresses the preface of his De poeta to Gabriel Vinea, “pride of commerce, delight of scholars” (mercatorum decus ac deliciae literatorum). Lyon had wealthy leisure for the same reason as Venice. Among the greater publishers of the sixteenth century were its Gryphius, Rouville, and De Tournes. Its large Italian population had been swelled by the exile ensuing upon the Pazzi conspiracy. It published the romances of Alamanni. Its most original author, Louise Labé, wrote some of her sonnets in Italian. Maurice Scève was the more typically a poet of his time in composing elaborate pageants for its solemn entries. His uncle Guillaume’s house was meantime a resort of scholars; and there is abundant other evidence of lively and various literary interchange. The literary leadership of Italy, then, was maintained less by the ducal courts than by the commercial cities. There it had animated the genius of Boccaccio and of Chaucer. The later influence of Italy on Wiat, Surrey, and Spenser, its more diffused influence through France, seem less fruitful for the progress of literature than the end of the Italian Middle Age.

Tardy recognition of this Italian continuity has led some historians to include in the Renaissance not only Chaucer, but Petrarch and Boccaccio, and even to begin it with Dante. But this, though it rebukes the complacency of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, tends to obscure the generally received significance of both Middle Age and Renaissance. The terms are not outworn. The division that they still express, after much revision of dates, is of general literary habits. It is the change from the feudal society living by manuscripts and reading aloud, with Latin for an international language of communication existing beside the established vernacular, to the rapidly commercializing society living by printed books amid widening education and nationalist aspirations, with Latin specialized as the vernacular widens its circle of readers. The latter is the society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The distinctive literary changes, indeed, were hardly attained before the sixteenth century. Though humanism as a theory was established in the fifteenth, the literary product of that century was generally feeble, as of a Middle Age gone to seed. Even the sixteenth century, conscious of revival, eager for standards, proud of learning, preoccupied with classicism, is more significant in its theorizing than in its achievement, in criticism and study than in literary advance. Whereas medieval poetry ranged far beyond medieval poetic, first in Dante and last in Chaucer, Renaissance poetry shows less advance in composition. It has no Dante, no Chaucer. The novella does not seize and carry forward the more intense narrative found in his various experiments by Boccaccio. The Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre is narratively inferior to the Decameron. The chivalric romances show a departure rather in style than in method from medieval romance; and their literary history from Ariosto to Spenser is not in terms of narrative art. Spenser is but the more typical of the Renaissance in that his great achievement of verse and style suffices without onward movement. The narrative slowness of his pageantry, the descriptive dilation, descend through the Renaissance partly from revived Alexandrianism, partly from medieval patterns discarded by Chaucer. Renaissance poets are not often even concerned with such a problem of composition as Chaucer’s reconceiving and recomposing of a long old story, lately retold with new life by Boccaccio, in his verse novel Troilus and Criseyde.

For all its confidence in a new day, Renaissance literary theory repeats some medieval commonplaces. The arts poétiques of the sixteenth century prolong the vogue of the “Ars poetica” of Horace. The old doctrine of poetic inspiration is renamed Platonic. The slighting of composition by medieval manuals is continued. Renaissance manuals are no less generally limited to style; for the old preoccupation is confirmed by the new insistence on style as an accomplishment and as conformity to standard. Thus the Renaissance long accepted tacitly the medieval confusion of poetic with rhetoric. Cicero’s De oratore was found to have lessons for poetry; Bembo, even as Johannes de Gerlandia, transferred from oratory to poetry the conventional classification of the “three styles”; and Minturno’s De poeta is by itself a complete identification of poetic with rhetoric. But Renaissance theory gradually advanced. The successive reinterpretations of Aristotle’s Poetic finally opened the way for seventeenth-century French classical drama. The better Renaissance rhetorics, using Quintilian as well as the greater Cicero to guide the increasing range and control of sixteenth-century prose, set forth a sounder and more fruitful classicism. Wherein classicism is typically a hindrance to literary progress, and wherein it is stimulus and guide, is amply revealed by the literary experience of the Renaissance.

Chapter II
LATIN, GREEK, AND THE VERNACULARS

1. HUMANISTIC LATIN

The Middle Age had developed Latin style freely as a medium of communication and variously as a medium of expression. On these terms Latin had had a progressive history as the literary language of western Europe. Latin remained the literary language for Erasmus and More in the early, for Buchanan even in the late, sixteenth century. More habitually composed in Latin, even when he meant to be printed in English; Erasmus and Buchanan both composed and published in Latin exclusively. The literary achievement of the vernaculars had challenged the Latin primacy. But, thought the humanists, that rivalry had been possible only because the primacy had been misused. Latin primacy to them was an article of literary faith, a dogma. It must not lapse; and to restore its authority all they needed was to restore its classical diction. No, says modern linguistic science in retrospect, that was a delusion; it could only segregate Latin farther. In fact Latin declined, slowly and as if inevitably, from a primary language to a secondary. But those who now mock the humanists for blindly hastening the decline of Latin to a “dead” language should remember that throughout the Renaissance itself Latin was active in every country and with almost every man of letters. It was far from dead; but it was no longer primary.

Evidently the scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw in the Latin literature of their time the revival of classical standards after medieval decadence. Rejecting the medieval experience, they were bent on restoring Latin to its classical eminence by reviving its classical forms and style. They proposed a new Latin literature in Augustan phrase.

Keeping its established place as the language of education, Latin continued to be thought of as a norm of permanence. As late as 1586 Montaigne, remembering his boyhood, says (III. ii): “To me Latin is, as it were, natural; I understand it better than French.” Later (1586-1588) he adds (III. ix): “I am writing my book for a few men and a few years. If there had been any idea of its lasting, I must have committed it to a language of more stability.” In other words, the vernaculars of course would continue to shift; not Latin. For by Latin the humanists meant the Latin of Vergil, Caesar, Sallust, above all of Cicero, the Latin of the great period. Renaissance humanism was a cult not merely of antiquity in general, but specifically of Augustan Latin. It sought to revive not only the ancient forms, but especially the ancient diction. The literary preoccupation of the Renaissance was with style. For the highest literary eminence, said the humanists, writing must be in Latin, that is in the superior language, and in Augustan Latin, that is in the style of the superior period.

The humanists demanded conformity, then, to Augustan diction. Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae linguae latinae (1476), reprinted again and again, first of a long line of phrase books, and characteristic in its very title, was a guide to conformity. Beyond conformity ranged imitation. Humanistic Latin is imitative in theory, and in practice so various as to furnish abundance of significant examples. These various degrees and kinds will appear in subsequent chapters. Meantime the obvious practical warrant for imitation is in exercises. Imitation in any art is a recognized means of study by practice; it is not an end. But Renaissance enthusiasm for revival often made elegant conformity a goal in itself. An oration might seem an achievement by being Ciceronian, a pastoral dialogue by being Vergilian. The subject, the idea, the message of a speech, a letter, a poem might have little claim; nevertheless publication might be warranted by the style. To exhibit the elegant diction and the harmonious sentence-forms of the great period might seem sufficient distinction. “Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” Posterity, instead of continuing to read such humanistic imitations, has long forgotten them. Few literary products have been less permanent than those of the cult of permanence. A pervasive danger in this classicism was its encouragement to a literature of themes.

2. GREEK

Even before the humanistic return to classical Latin another vista of the ancient world had been opened by the revival of Greek. Generally in abeyance through most of the Middle Age, Greek had been recovered in the fourteenth century and was well established in the early fifteenth. It was studied by both Boccaccio and Petrarch. It had its professor at the Florence studium (1396) in Chrysolaras, who went to England in 1400. Guarino, his pupil at Constantinople, after bringing Greek to Florence and Venice, settled (1431) at Ferrara, and attracted among his many famous pupils the Englishmen Gray, Free, Gunthorpe, and Tiptoft.[3] Bessarion was at the Council of Constance (1414). The fall of Constantinople (1453), sending many Greek exiles to Italy, merely increased opportunities already widely available. Even before the establishment of printing there was increasing circulation of manuscripts. Aurispa (1372-1460), for instance, besides being scholar and professor, was an active dealer. Printing came in the nick of time to spread the new vogue. There was a Florence text of Homer in 1488, an Aldus in 1504. Aristotle, besides being translated anew, had a Greek text in 1495 (Venice), another in 1503 (Paris). Sophocles was printed by Aldus in 1502. Even the earliest sixteenth century commanded texts of a considerable variety of Greek authors.

The variety, indeed, is striking. Evidently the humanistic cult of an ideal period of Latin did not guide the selection of Greek. All was fish that came to the Renaissance Greek net. Late Greek was as welcome as the Greek of the great dramatists and orators; Alexandrian, as epic. With the vogue of Plato in the fifteenth century came that of the neo-Platonists; with the texts and translations of Aristotle, Hermes Trismegistus; with Homer, the Anthology and Apollonius Rhodius. Isocrates vied once more with Demosthenes. Nor did Sophocles oust Seneca, or Thucydides prevail against Livy. The wide and continued influence of sophistic appears in the vogue of Athenaeus, Hermogenes, Aphthonius, and even Libanius. Discrimination, indeed, was sometimes beyond Renaissance scholarship. Henri Étienne, one of the best Greek scholars of the sixteenth century, published (1554) a collection of Byzantine imitations which he supposed to belong to the time of Anacreon. This was the Anacreon that inspired Ronsard and was translated by Belleau. Since textual criticism was hardly understood before the seventeenth century, hardly formulated before the eighteenth, Renaissance printed texts are generally inaccurate.[4] Nevertheless to have Greek authors, classical and decadent, at first hand, to read the message in its own style, even imperfectly, was a literary experience and had some excitement of exploration.

Thus was opened more widely a literature recommended alike by the praise and by the imitation of the Augustan Romans. Habits of language and style outside the Latin tradition, for the first time in centuries, were made generally available. How far they availed, how far Greek operated as language, especially on the widening vernacular literatures, can better be gathered from the progress of this history than measured here in advance. At first view the influence seems extensive. Renaissance scholars as a matter of course at least professed to know Greek; and most authors at least professed to be scholars. Poliziano was both; and his knowledge of Greek seems to have been solid. In 1485 his Oratio in expositione Homeri thus compliments his university audience on its command of Greek.

You are those Florentines in whose city all Greek learning, long extinct in Greece itself, has so revived and flourished that both your men expound Greek literature in public lectures and the youths of your highest nobility, as never has happened in Italy for a thousand years, speak Attic so purely, so easily and smoothly, that Athens, instead of being sacked and seized by barbarians, seems itself, of its own will wrenched away with its own soil and, so to speak, with all its furniture, to have immigrated to Florence and there entirely and intimately to have founded itself anew (Gryphius edition, Lyon, 1537-1539, III. 63-64).

The obvious exaggeration of an introductory public lecture does not lead him to quote Homer in Greek. The abundant examples are given in his Latin translation. Moreover this encomium of Homer relies not on specific considerations of Greek language and style, but on such conventional topics as could be derived equally well from a translation. The writing of Greek, in spite of occasional published efforts, is probably measured with his usual justice by Bembo. “We study Greek not to use it, except for exercise, but the better to explore Latin.”[5] Poliziano, in spite of his Greek and of his youthful achievement in Italian verse, wrote the bulk of his work in Latin prose. Rabelais from his monastery at Fontenay-le-Comte (1521) invoked the help of Budé toward procuring Greek books; he translated a Greek author who had already been translated; but how much Greek he achieved is hard to determine. Of Julius Caesar Scaliger, whose Greek was one of his warrants for vanity, Egger says: “though he knows much Greek, he seems to know it ill.”[6] The same critic records of Henri Étienne: “From the age of fifteen he knew and spoke Greek almost as his native language, and better than Latin.”[7] Ronsard’s imitation of Greek verse is based on knowledge of the Greek language. Montaigne, saturated in Plutarch, tells us that he knows no Greek. His Plutarch is the translation of Amyot; and from Amyot, not from the Greek text of Longus, is derived the vogue of Daphnis and Chloe. Both the extent and the character of Greek influence may more safely be estimated thus from individual literary forms and even from individual authors.

One general influence may be guessed from the stimulus given by Greek to the Renaissance vogue of mythology. Boccaccio had already, in his Genealogia deorum gentilium[8] ranged beyond Ovid; and in the sixteenth century such manuals as Natale Conti’s (Natalis Comes) Mythologiae (1580) were in active demand. Mythology equipped the poetry not only of printed books, but also of pageants and solemn entries. It was so widely pervasive as to seem almost obligatory. But how much of this vogue was due to Greek? Greek mythology had been in ancient times largely taken over into Latin. The distinctively Greek habit, that is the earlier mythological habit, is to feel and treat the myth not merely as a conventional allusion, but as a perennial story. For the literary use of mythology is twofold. Either it is decorative, one of the ornaments of style, or it is itself a form of poetry. The latter, the perennial recreation of Prometheus or Medea, was less conspicuous in Latin poetry than in Greek. How far the revival of Greek brought it back may here and there be divined. It never quite dies. The widespread medieval story of Mélusine is essentially identical with Medea, though it did not come through Greek. On the other hand, Ariosto’s Angelica bound to the rock directly suggests Andromeda, though the myth reappears also in the popular ballad of Kemp Owen. Such myth-making gives a clue to Boccaccio’s Ameto. There is something of it in Poliziano’s Orfeo. It is carefully imitated from Pindar by Ronsard. It somewhat vaguely animates Spenser. But it is not common in the Renaissance. For the Renaissance generally, regarding mythology in the more usual way as a mine of stylistic ornament, was merely more anxious to have it standardized, to be sure that gods and goddesses wore the correct classical costumes. Diana in the Venatio (1512) of Adrian, Cardinal Corneto, is such a figure; and her attendant nymphs are as much part of the decoration as the chased bowls. Indeed, the Middle Age, frankly adapting ancient cults to its own time, had been nearer to the Greek habit. Chaucer had made the temple in his Troilus and Criseyde a cathedral, and called the Palladion a relic. While Renaissance painting was handling mythology in this free way, Renaissance literature often used it merely as archaistic decoration.

Thus it appears in Francesco Colonna’s fantastic allegory Hypnerotomachia (1467), and in its abundant woodcuts. The main figures, though they have Greek names, are allegorical in the fashion of the Roman de la Rose. The guide Logistica, for instance, is Reason; the other guide, Thelemia,[9] Desire or Will. The nymphs met at every turn serve for erotic suggestion; the Greek inscriptions, for decoration. Colonna’s diction is studiously deformed by such Greek coinage as lithoglypho, hypaethrio, chariceumati. The precious style thus becomes a dilated pedantic jargon. In the whole preposterous book there is nothing Greek below the surface.

How far did Greek influence Renaissance thought? Aristotle had dominated the Middle Age in the Latin translations of Boethius and in Latin versions of the Arabs. The Renaissance retranslated him and published the Greek text. It restored him to challenge him. Were the Renaissance translations superior to those of Boethius, who was scholar and philosopher as well as poet? Did the Renaissance texts convey him more truly? Renaissance texts are often questionable; and Aristotle’s Poetic, at least, was understood very slowly. The Renaissance welcomed Plato. Was it Plato? Why is Renaissance Platonism peculiarly difficult to measure, or even to define? Such questions are relevant here only to the revival of the Greek language. How far did this revival guide philosophy? The question comes up incidentally in one of Sperone Speroni’s earlier dialogues, Dialogo delle lingue (about 1540); and the answer is so unusual as to be startling. Philosophy has not been advanced by our study of Latin and Greek; it has been deviated. This sharp turn, in a dialogue discussing the superiority of Latin and Greek to the vernaculars, comes as a reminiscence of the teaching of Peretto.

Peretto (p. 121) used to say that the time spent on learning Latin and Greek actually hinders learning and developing philosophy. No language (p. 123) has in itself any peculiar value. Aristotle, therefore, not only may be studied in Latin, but might be studied in Italian. In fact (p. 126), language studies may be illusory, as we see around us. “I grieve at the wretched condition of these modern times, in which study is spent not in being, but in seeming wise.... We think we know something well enough when, without comprehending its nature, we are able to give it the name given by Cicero, Pliny, Lucretius, Vergil, or Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Aeschines.”[10]

Hardly more than a parenthesis, this stands out as a challenge both of the superiority of Greek as a language and, more generally, of Renaissance confidence in language studies as a means of education.

Such challenges are rare. Bembo, in Speroni’s dialogue, will not admit any such heresy as the equality of languages; nor, we may well assume, would Sperone himself admit that language study was hindering philosophy. For the Renaissance generally agreed that education should normally proceed through the study of languages. Of this the “new learning” was no less persuaded than the old. The newness consisted in revising the traditional Latin and in adding other languages, especially Greek. Louvain established (1518) the College of the Three Languages (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew); and the same name was at first commonly applied to the Collège de France (1530). Though this royal foundation was effectually new in other aspects that now may seem more important, its idea and inception came in great part from the movement for Greek in education. Nor did the movement stop with the individual college. Nothing more vividly exemplifies Renaissance preoccupation with language studies than the addition of Greek to the university curriculum. Thwarted, in a time of bitter controversy, by the association of Greek with Protestantism, the cause was won before the end of the century. The prescription promulgated officially in 1600, and the educational theory behind it, held substantially for three hundred years. There, at least, is a permanent result of the Renaissance.

3. THE VERNACULARS

(a) Italian

The humanist assertion of the literary superiority of Latin did not pass unchallenged even in the fifteenth century. Alberti (1404-1472), scholar and philosopher, insisted that actual communication, the conveying of a message, should be in the vernacular, and set an example by writing many of his learned works in Italian. Though humanists might disparage even so great a succession as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and in the languid period some promising ambitions might be deviated into Latin, by the sixteenth century the literary rights of the vernacular were both recovered in practice and acknowledged in theory. The shift of opinion is significantly recorded by Bembo. Elegant Latinist, accomplished poet in the vernacular, judicious critic, he posed in an Italian literary dialogue (Prose, Venice, 1525), Giuliano de’ Medici, Federigo Fregoso, and Hercole Strozza discussing the capacity of Italian style:

I. Our vernacular, most explored and perfected at Florence, is more intimate to us than Latin, as to the Romans Latin was than Greek (i-iv). Yes, but as Greek was then superior, so Latin is now. Answer (v): if that implied that the superior should always be cultivated, nobody would ever have written well in his own language. As Cicero sought to augment the authority of his own Latin, so did Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio for Italian. Greek (vi) we may dismiss, since it is not a medium for us; we study it not to use it, but the better to explore Latin. Provençal (vii-xi), though once an important language of literature and very influential in our early poetry, has been superseded by Italian.

But if we are to use the vernacular for literature, which vernacular? (xii) Italian is not uniform. Shall we adopt the language of the Papal Court? No; it has not writers enough to constitute literary authority. Tuscan (xiii-xv) is best, as having shown amplest capacity, and as actually holding the literary leadership.

Shall we incline, then, to its older usage, or to current popular speech? Answer (xvi-xvii): we are not limited to this dilemma. We may cultivate a diction that remains acceptable. Cicero or Demosthenes made himself entirely intelligible to the populace without speaking as the populace would have spoken to him.

II. An historical review (xx) of Italian poetry to and from Dante finds all its graces united in Petrarch. So (xxi) all previous prose writers were surpassed by Boccaccio. No subsequent writers have equalled these two. Meantime Latin has been so freed from the rust of ignorant centuries that today it has regained its ancient splendor and charm.

In an analysis (xxiii-xxviii) of style under the classical headings, Dante (xxiv) is rebuked for base words. He might better have left out the things.

The qualities of vowels and of consonants (xxvii-xxviii), and the three kinds of rhyme (xxix), with examples from Petrarch, lead to a discussion of rhythm (numero, xxxii-xxxiii), quantity (tempo, xxxv), and variation. The conclusion reaffirms the preëminence of Petrarch and Boccaccio.

III. The noble works of Michael Angelo and of Raphael should spur us to a like achievement in literature. This final section discusses Tuscan in detail: word-forms, inflection, syntax, and especially usage.

The dialogue opens a vista into contemporary thought about style. The objection to Dante’s base words, startling to us now, was made frequently then. No less characteristic of the time is the homage to Petrarch as great poet and as master of style. Giraldi Cinthio expressed the common view in a flowery simile.

But the law is not so strict for romances as not to permit more license in words than is customary for sonnets and canzoni. Long and serious subjects, if the conception is not to be warped, need such latitude, which must nevertheless be limited. Petrarch shows this clearly in his Trionfi. I will not cite Dante; for whether through the fault of his age, or because of his own nature, he took so many liberties that his liberty became a fault. Therefore I find quite judicious that painter who, to show us in a fair scene the literary value of the one poet and the other, imagined both in a green and flowery mead on the slopes of Helicon, and put into Dante’s hand a scythe, which, with his gown tucked up to his knees, he was wielding in circles, cutting every plant that the scythe struck. Behind Dante he painted Petrarch, in senatorial robe, stooping to select the noble plants and the well-bred flowers—all this to show us the liberty of the one and the judgment and observance of the other (Discorsi, Venice, 1554, pp. 133-134).

What Bembo calls Tuscan was at once a fact and an ideal. It is the current name not only for the diction of Tuscany, but for the literary diction increasingly practiced by all writers in Italian. Castiglione feels himself bound to defend certain Lombard words. Ariosto anxiously revises to conform. Tasso has a dispute with the Accademia della Crusca. The most distinct dialect was in Naples. To conform to Tuscan was for Neopolitans most nearly like acquiring another language. But even there, and much more readily in other parts of Italy, Tuscan was accepted and increasingly practiced as literary Italian. Used by scholars who also wrote Latin, Italian naturally learned from Cicero and Vergil more logical and rhythmical sentence habits, more adroit shaping of verse. Thus the best result of humanism, perhaps, was the one least sought by the humanists, the refinement of the vernacular.

Lodovico Dolce’s Observations on the Vernacular (Venice, 1550) is an Italian grammar addressed to educated readers and using the classical headings. A section (157-186) on punctuation shows both the new emphasis demanded by printing and a shift of control from rhythm toward logic. Nearly fifty pages are devoted to Italian verse forms. Though there are many examples from Boccaccio and a few from other authors, the great exemplar throughout is Petrarch. Petrarch, then, was a model for Italian poetry, Boccaccio for prose. As humanist Latin had its thesaurus, so the cult of native models should have wherewith to guide both study and imitation. Francesco Alunno’s Observations on Petrarch (1539) is a concordance plus a text of the sonnets and canzoni. His concordance of Boccaccio’s Decameron (1543) has the significant title The Riches of the Vernacular. Finally The Frame of the World (Della fabrica del mondo, 1546-1548) is entitled further “ten books containing the words of Dante, Petrarch, Bembo, and other good authors, by means of which writers may express with ease and eloquence all man’s conceptions of any created thing whatsoever.” The ten divisions are God, heaven, the world, the elements, the soul, the body, man, quality, quantity, and hell. On this grandiose scale the thesaurus carried out for mature writers in the vernacular the idea of contemporary schoolbooks for Latin themes. It was indeed a copia.

(b) French

Italian theory of the vernacular being typical generally, and being moreover quickly known in France, the progress of French thought need not be detailed. Jean Lemaire allegorized La Concorde des deux langages (about 1512) to urge Frenchmen and Italians together from lower to higher poetry. No less than Italy France saw its literary future in the vernacular. But France had not so compelling a literary past. Its fourteenth century had no such mighty succession as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Its medieval greatness was more remote; its medieval survivals, generally languid. So the more ardent of coming French poets were ready to repudiate not only medieval Latin for classical Latin, but also medieval French verse for a new, classical French poetry. The promotion of this is the movement called the Pléiade; and its manifesto is Joachim du Bellay’s Deffense et illustration de la langue française (1549).

The main idea is so to enrich French diction as to establish an equality with Greek and Latin. This is the meaning of illustration in the title. More than a century later Dryden used the same Latin root for the same idea when he said that medieval English poetry lacked lustre. Greek or Latin, Du Bellay urges, has no such linguistic superiority as to compel our using it as our own literary medium. Cultivation of the classics as languages leads to pedantry. Philosophy is not a language study. Those who so pursue it seem more anxious to show learning than to have it. For a literary career, indeed, one must know Latin and preferably Greek also, but not as an end and not as a medium of expression. Latin and Greek, then, have their value in the writer’s education, not in his writing; but Du Bellay does not draw this inference explicitly, and seems not to see the further inference that the real enriching is not of one’s language, but of oneself. For he proposes that French be improved by classical grafts, and further by imitation of classical style. Let us enhance French literature, he urges, by making French language more classical.

Thus to reduce the treatise to its lowest terms is quite unjust to its suggestiveness. But its intrinsic value at best is less than its historical. Ignoring a French medieval achievement already forgotten or misunderstood, it turns humanist imitation toward giving French poetry classical lustre.

Such manipulation was unchecked by any considerable knowledge of the actual development of language. Even the learned Benedictine, Périon, derived French from Greek (Ioachimi Perionii Benedictini ... dialogorum de linguae gallicae origine, eiusque cum graeca cognatione, libri quatuor, Paris, 1555; dedication dated 1554).

Périon is cautious in his conclusions, as in his title. He has unusual grasp of phonetic cognates: b, f, p, v (p. 54); t, d, th (p. 107 verso); c, ch, g, k (p. 125). He admits, of course, the large influence of Latin. But he seems to think that Gallic derived directly from Greek, and added its abundant Latin later. What he cites in his parallels is not Celtic, but French. Though the historical introduction is negligible, the linguistic proof, even where it is in error, shows both awareness of language processes and some scientific knowledge.

French is like Greek, he finds, in the habit of articles (p. 107), in accent (p. 111), in nouns ending -on and te, in having an aorist (p. 134), in using the infinitive as a verbal noun (p. 135). Thus though his theory and many of his particular derivations are unsound, his method of observing language habits is ahead of his time. Citing Budé, Baif, and a few Latin authors, he seems in the main to have worked independently from his own observations.

That so much knowledge of detail should reach so little grasp of the whole shows the prevailing ignorance of linguistic science.

The last quarter of the sixteenth century raised among the vernaculars the question of rank. Enthusiasm for the theory and the achievement of Italian had led some Frenchmen, in spite of the triumphs of Ronsard, to disparage their own. In 1579, thirty years after Du Bellay’s manifesto, Henri Étienne (Henricus Stephanus), scholar and editor, sought not only to vindicate French rights, but to demonstrate French superiority, in his book on the Preëminence of the French Language (Project du livre entitulé De la précellence du langage françois).[11]

Under the headings weight (gravité, p. 196), charm (grace, p. 217), and range (richesse, p. 246) he proposes to prove (p. 176) that “our French language surpasses all the other vernaculars.” Spanish he dismisses (p. 179) as evidently inferior to Italian, and hence to French. English is not even mentioned. The demonstration is of French superiority to Italian.

First (p. 181), French is more stable. We have never needed “grands personnages” to tell Frenchmen how to use French. Where they have occasionally done so for pleasure, they have not left us in the dark with their disputes. The objection that we are not agreed as to which part of France has standard French, nor as to how it should be spelled, is rebutted. French and Italian translations of the same original (p. 204) are put side by side. It is noteworthy that Ronsard (pp. 207-208) in each case dilates.

In detail, Italian inflectional endings lead to monotony (p. 218); and Italian word-forms are not consistently adapted from the Latin. French is richer in diminutives (p. 241), in its legacy (p. 260) from medieval romances and crafts, and (p. 314) in proverbs. Its facility in adaptation (p. 280) appears especially in compounds.

An Italian of equal learning could readily counter on each of these points. Could he disprove the whole? Could he prove the superiority of Italian? Can any language be proved superior to all others? As between two modern languages, the preference, many would say, is grounded not on demonstration, but on taste and habit. Italian cannot be proved superior or inferior to Spanish, French to English. Each writer naturally prizes the language that he knows best above another that he knows less. Étienne’s thesis is not susceptible of proof. Perhaps; but what of Greek and Latin? Some men even today, far more in the Renaissance, would offer to prove that Greek is a superior language. For Étienne’s treatise raises in a new quarter an old question that even now is not answered unanimously.

Whatever one’s attitude toward this larger question, and however unconvincing Étienne may seem, his treatise is not absurd; nor is it a Renaissance tour de force. It is both serious and learned. Latinist and Hellenist, exact in the fine tradition of his house, he had the right to speak on language. His citing (p. 288) of historical consonant change shows some inkling, most uncommon in his time, of linguistic science. But in 1579 he could not know linguistic sufficiently. He assumes, as Du Bellay does, that processes of language are largely conscious, even deliberate choice (pp. 224, 400). His assumption that Provençal is French (Bembo had assumed that it was Italian) is not mere begging of the question. No one of his time could know the historical processes by which Provençal, Tuscan, Spanish, northern French, not to mention other tongues, had evolved from Latin. Even so, some of his citations of forms still have linguistic value. The larger value is in the literary discrimination of his wide reading, in the ingenious device of parallel translations, and in the significance of a dispute that was bound to recur as each vernacular came to represent more and more a national self-consciousness.

(c) English

National self-consciousness became notorious in England with the Elizabethans. Even with them lingers a certain nervousness as to the capacity of the English language. Such doubts arose not only from humanistic exaltation of Latin, but even more from ignorance of linguistic history. The barren fifteenth century had at least established the language of London as the English literary norm. The northern speech indiscriminately called Scotch, though its literary use persisted through the sixteenth century, came to be regarded as a dialect. The language of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and generally of Caxton’s publications, is substantially the same as that of the Canterbury Tales. By the time of Surrey, England had its Tuscan. Sixteenth-century literary usage in England, though its emergence from the barren period may seem slower than in Italy and France, is hardly more lax. The recklessness of Skelton, as the later recklessness of Rabelais, was individual extravagance. The vagaries of Spenser are not reckless; they are deliberate archaism. Where they violate the language of Chaucer, they show merely that a Renaissance poet who knew Latin and Greek, as well as French and Italian, might remain unaware of linguistic history, even in his own language. If the printed texts that he used had been more accurate, he might still have been too bent on following the lead of the Pléiade in manipulating language toward a new poetry to notice the difference between an infinitive and a preterit. For him Chaucer’s words were color and sound, not forms. But though he misread Middle English, he felt too deeply what Ascham missed altogether, the tradition of English poetry, to dally long with classicizing metric. There had been no one to do for Chaucer what Alunno had done for Petrarch. Nevertheless, even without the help of good lexicons and grammars, Renaissance English shows a sufficient continuity of literary acceptance.

Prose, of course, lingered behind verse. Chaucer’s prose rendering of Boethius, in sharpest contrast to his verse, had been groping. Malory’s prose was sufficient for narrative, though not for such philosophical discussion. Prose control in both narrative and discussion seems assured first in Sir Thomas More; but as late as John Lyly the progress of prose was still uncertain. The brief vogue of “Euphuism” shows an attempt to “enrich” the vernacular by Latin sentence figures. Lyly came to recognize that the vernacular had its own literary ways and its own literary rights. Finally from being a court writer he turned to whole-hearted pursuit of the actual vernacular in order to win the larger audience. For the idea of changing one’s native language by classical grafts or other literary manipulation, though it was unchecked by any accurate or extensive linguistic science,[12] gradually gave way before the facts of literary experience.

Chapter III
IMITATION OF PROSE FORMS, CICERONIANISM, RHETORICS

1. ORATIONS, LETTERS, DIALOGUES

Renaissance classicism is most obvious in adoption of prose forms. Orations, letters, dialogues, first in Latin, then in the vernaculars, studiously conform. Orations were none the less a preoccupation because they had little to do with affairs. Actual Renaissance conduct of government soon left little room for moving the people to action by oratory. Legal pleading, as always, had its special technic. But the oratory of occasion, that third type which marks anniversaries, extols achievements, and commemorates great men, was invited widely and cultivated classically. It embraces most of the published oratory of the Renaissance, and was practiced by most of the humanists in Latin. Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo (Leonardo Aretino) is typical both as official orator of Florence and in his early imaginary orations. Agostino Dati of Siena delivered an encomium of Eusebius (De laudibus D. Eusebii presbyt. Stridonensis et Ecclesiae maximi doctoris, in ejus solemniis publice habita, anno 1446). The funeral of Cardinal Bessarion at Rome had a Latin oration by the Cardinal Capranica. Jacopo Caviceo cast his congratulatory address to Maximilian on the victory (1490) over King Ladislaus of Bohemia in the form called prosopopoeia, that is, of imaginary addresses by Babylon, Troy, Byzantium, Carthage, and Rome (Urbium dicta ad Maximilianum Federici Tertii Caesaris filium Romanorum regem triumphantissimum, Parma, 1491). The Cologne collection, Orationes clarorum virorum,[13] made such oratory available for study and imitation.

Of the Italian orations collected by Francesco Sansovino (Venice, 1561, including some translations) as representative of his time, only one fifth are political, and these only to the extent of being hortatory. The rest are all occasional: nine funeral orations, a Christmas address, two before an academy, a call to high aim, a praise of Italian, four congratulations, and four imaginary addresses (prosopopoeiae). Claudio Tolomei has two imaginary orations, one for, the other against.[14] Such oratory, of course, is perennial. Its Renaissance vogue is distinctive only in being almost exclusive and in being imitative. Bartolomeo Ricci records[15] that on two occasions in his office of public orator at Ferrara he imitated specific orations of Cicero. The habit was general. The desire to sound classical led even to the lifting of Augustan phrases and cadences. Similar conditions had led the decadent Greek oratory called sophistic[16] into archaism as a means of display. Renaissance oratory, even when it was not led further into the sophistic sacrifice of the message to the speaker, was thus habitually literary. In Latin especially it was less often a means of persuasion than an imitative literary form.

What the Latin oration might nevertheless attain was exhibited by the lectures of Poliziano and again in the range of Marc Antoine Muret (Muretus, 1525-1585). From a conventional praelectio on the Aeneid (1579) Muret turned to Tacitus (1580), not only with lively vigor, but with penetrative suggestion and urgent sentences. When he returned to official oratory for the feasts of St John Evangelist (1582) and the Circumcision (1584), he kept the suggestiveness within the obligatory pattern. True to their kind, models of conciseness, these have also their own appeal. Occasional oratory in the Renaissance, then, might be a literary achievement and a literary progress. More generally it was but one evidence of the Renaissance preoccupation with rhetoric.

No less inevitable among the published works of the humanists are their collected Latin letters. Since these had been carefully composed and revised, they might serve not only history, but literature. Sometimes in effect essays, sometimes almost orations, they are sometimes themes. The favorite model is Cicero; and in extreme cases the letter seems to consist of style. It is hardly a letter; it is an exercise. But thus to label Renaissance letter-writing generally would be grossly unfair. Poliziano’s letter to Paolo Cortesi is admirable as a letter, and comes into literary history on that ground. For so letters have entered literature in any time. A Latin letter of John of Salisbury[17] lifts the heart and fills the eyes. Its cadences are studiously conformed to the cursus of the Curial dictamen; its diction is expertly chosen to strike always by appeal and suggestion, never by violence; its hazardous course steers between Scylla and Charybdis because it is constantly shaped to its goal. For all this skill is spent singly on making the truth prevail. A less important, but more famous English letter, Dr Johnson’s to the Earl of Chesterfield, is no less studious of style, no less expertly adjusted, even to the phrasing of the obligatory subscription, and no less single in its aim. Those who make light of such delicacy as mere style have much to learn both of letters and of literature. Among the works of Erasmus none is more important than his collected letters. The Renaissance did well to study Latin letters, and learned much. But it was mistaken in thinking that a letter reaches posterity except by reaching its original address and aim. The Latin letters of the Renaissance often betray a tendency to regard classical style as an end in itself. Such letters, written to be literary, give the impression that the Latin letter is a Renaissance literary form.

Perhaps the most popular of ancient prose forms in the Renaissance was the dialogue; for it was used even oftener in the vernaculars than in Latin, and became a favorite form of exposition. The Middle Age, of course, had many dialogues, but not of this sort. Débat, estrif, conflictus, amoebean eclogue were often allegorical and generally forms of poetry. Renaissance dialogue is typically prose discussion. Its vogue was evidently stimulated by the increasing availability of Plato in both translation and Greek text; but its method is not often his. The Platonic dialogue typically conveys the illusion of creative conversation. As Sperone Speroni observes,[18] it is a sort of prose that takes after poetry. It invites the reader to join a quest for truth, to feel his way with the speakers, to measure this objection, respond to that hint; and often it leaves him still guessing with them, still questing. The other ancient literary type of dialogue is Cicero’s De oratore. This is less conversation than debate with definite argument, rebuttal, and progress to a conclusion.[19] Cicero’s dialogue is not a quest; it is an exposition of something already determined, and it unfolds that by logical stages. Renaissance dialogue, having generally his object, turns oftener to his type; but it does not forget Plato. The more dramatic grouping of friends in converse appealed widely to Renaissance imagination. It was imitated in Platonic academies as well as in writing; and its form of dialogue opened more opportunities for exhibiting one’s literary acquaintance and bringing forward one’s literary friends. Further Renaissance dialogues did not often go with Plato. They stopped with the Platonic setting, or used challenges merely for transition. Even the most popular of them all, Castiglione’s Cortegiano, though its personae are unusually distinct, and though it concludes upon Platonic love, is evidently framed upon the De oratore. Platonic dialogue must be easy to read; it is by no means easy to write; witness the failure of many imitations, both Renaissance and modern. It is a very delicate adjustment of poetic to rhetoric. The grafting of Plato on Cicero demands long preparation. The usual Renaissance compromise of letting Plato introduce the speakers and Cicero rule their discourse was practically sufficient for the better Renaissance dialogues. The inferior ones have nothing but the externals of either. Their rejoinders, neither conversation nor debate, become tedious ceremony;[20] and their composition lacks the Ciceronian sequence. But even these show how widely the dialogue form was imitated from antiquity.

2. CICERONIANISM

The pervasive humanistic imitation was not adoption of forms; it was borrowing of style. The logical extreme of the humanist cult of Augustan Latin is the exclusive imitation of Cicero as the ideal of prose style. In 1422 Gherardo Landriani, Bishop of Lodi, drew from a long-forgotten chest in the cathedral library a complete manuscript of the principal works of Cicero on rhetoric. The De oratore and the Orator are the most mature and suggestive treatment of oratory by the greatest Roman orator. “Summe gaudeo, I have the greatest delight,” wrote Poggio on receiving the news in London; and Niccolo de’Niccoli of Florence promised a copy to Aurispa in Constantinople. So widely was the world of scholarship stirred. For the recovery of the greater Cicero directly stimulated Renaissance classicism. In the Middle Age Cicero had been rather a name of honor than a literary influence. His De inventione, a common source of medieval rhetoric, is only a youthful compend. What was usually added for further study, especially of style, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, was ascribed to him quite erroneously. His greater works on rhetoric were appreciated doubtless here and there, as by John of Salisbury, but not generally. Hence the recovery of the De oratore in 1422 was indeed an event in the history of literature. This and Orator are fine encomia of the higher function of oratory, and of the orator as leader. Neither is a manual. Both in Cicero’s intention are contributions to the philosophy of rhetoric. Without very original or even very specific doctrine they are eloquently persuasive. What did the Renaissance do with them?

Most obviously it carried classicism to the extreme of Ciceronianism, that exclusive imitation which made Cicero the ideal of Latin prose, the perfect model. The doctrine involves certain characteristic assumptions: (1) that Latin, or any other language, attains in a certain historical period its ideal achievement and capacity, (2) that within such a great period style is constant, (3) that a language can be recalled from later usage to earlier in scholastic exercises, (4) that such exercises can suffice for personal expression, (5) that a single author can suffice as a model, even for exercises.

Medieval Latin had departed from classical usage because it was a living language, so widely active in communication as to grow. Men used it without being disconcerted by changes from place to place, from time to time. Such changes are inevitable so long as a language is used generally. Denotations are extended or contracted, connotations are modified or superseded, even by written use. Oral use adds changes in cadence. From the seventh century on through the Middle Age Latin was accentual. The speech tune of Cicero had faded; and no one had tried to resuscitate what had been supplanted by other cadences. The Latin hymns had carried medieval measures to the heights of poetry. Not till the seventeenth century did humanism succeed in having them revised classically; and fifty volumes have since been spent in recovering their medieval forms.[21] The extreme form of Renaissance classicism, by ignoring the historical development of language, tended to inhibit the use of Latin in immediate appeal.

So rigid a doctrine did not, of course, enlist all Renaissance humanists. The more judicious were content to select certain expert habits, especially Cicero’s strong and supple wielding of sentences. But the extremists, such as Christophe de Longueil (Longolius, 1488-1522), got fame; the doctrine continued in teaching and in practice; and as late as 1583 there was point in Sidney’s scornful allusion to “Nizolian paper books.” His readers knew that he meant the use of the Cicero thesaurus as a handbook for composition. Even where it did not enlist devotees, Ciceronianism confirmed the prevalent idea of the standard diction of the great period. Yet before the end of the fifteenth century both the general assumption and the particular cult had been exploded by Poliziano. As university teacher, in the introductory lecture (praelectio) of his course at Florence on Quintilian and Statius, he challenged the doctrine of the ideal classical period by a plea for the pedagogical value of later Latin.

Finally I would not attach undue importance to the objection that the eloquence of these writers was already corrupted by their period; for if we regard it aright, we shall perceive that it was not so much corrupted and debased as changed in kind. Nor should we call it inferior just because it is different. Certainly it shows greater cultivation of charm: more frequent pleasantry, many epigrams, many figures, no dull realizations, no inert structure; all not so much sound as also strong, gay, prompt, full of blood and color. Therefore, though we may indisputably concede most to those authors who are greatest, so we may justly contend that some qualities which are earlier attained and much more attainable [i.e., by students] are found in these [minor authors]. So, since it is a capital vice to wish to imitate one author and him alone, we are not off the track if we study these before those, if we do some things for their practical use.... [So, he adds, did Cicero himself when he turned from the Attic orators to the Rhodian and even to the Asiatic.] So that noble painter who was asked with what master he had made the most progress replied strikingly “With that one,” pointing to the populace; yes, and rightly too. For since nothing in human nature is happy in every aspect, many men’s excellences must be viewed, that one thing may stick from one, another thing from another, and that each [student] may adapt what suits him (Opera, Gryphius edition, Lyon, 1537-1539, III, 108-109).

Perhaps nothing else so pointed and telling against Ciceronianism was written during the Renaissance as Poliziano’s letter to Paolo Cortesi.

Nor are those who are thought to have held the first rank of eloquence like one another, as has been remarked by Seneca. Quintilian laughs at those who shall think themselves cousins of Cicero because they conclude a period with esse videatur. Horace declaims against imitators who are nothing but imitators. Certainly they who compose only by imitation seem to me like parrots or magpies uttering what they do not understand. For what they write lacks force and life, lacks impulse, lacks emotion, lacks individuality, lies down, sleeps, snores. Nothing true there, nothing solid, nothing effective. But are you not, some one asks, expressing Cicero? What of it? I am not Cicero. I am expressing, I think, myself. Besides, there are some, my dear Paul, who beg their style, as it were bread, piecemeal, who live not only from the day, but unto the day. Thus unless they have at hand the one book to cull from, they cannot join three words without spoiling them by rude connection or disgraceful barbarism. Their speech is always tremulous, vacillating, ailing, in a word so ill cared and ill fed that I cannot bear them, especially when they pass judgment on those whose styles deep study, manifold reading, and long practice have as it were fermented. But to come back to you, Paul, of whom I am very fond, to whom I owe much, whose talent I value very highly, I am asking whether you so bind yourself by this superstition that nothing pleases you which is simply yours, and that you never take your eyes from Cicero. When you have read Cicero—and other good authors—much and long, worn them down, learned them by heart, concocted, filled your breast with the knowledge of many things, and are now about to compose something yourself, then at last I would have you swim, as the saying is, without corks, take sometimes your own advice, doff that too morose and anxious solicitude to make yourself merely a Cicero—in a word risk your whole strength (Opera, Gryphius edition, Lyon, 1537-1539, I, 251).

The writer of that letter, in spite of his youthful triumphs in the vernacular, gave his mature years to the writing of Latin and the teaching of Latin and Greek literature. Unfortunately his expert Latin did not move Renaissance classicism to abandon either the practice of Ciceronianism or the theory of the ideal great period.

Some forty years after the destructive analysis of Poliziano, Ciceronianism was still active enough to draw the satire of Erasmus in the Dialogus Ciceronianus (1528). This reductio ad absurdum, beginning with the error of using a Cicero thesaurus as a handbook for composing, proceeds to the affectation of using for the Christian religion the terms proper to classical paganism: Jupiter Optimus Maximus for God the Father, Apollo for the Christ. Erasmus amuses himself by thus rewriting the Apostles’ Creed in Ciceronian terms. His point is not merely the pedantry of such paganism, nor its irreverence, but its unreality. Only the words can be taken over; the meaning or the suggestion, in one direction or the other, is violated. The point had been made more forcibly, because more practically, by Poliziano. Preoccupation with past usage thwarts the expression of actual present things and thoughts. Further Erasmus makes his Ciceronian admit that the cult is illusory, a dream which according to its own adepts has never quite come true. Incidentally the names thus brought up in the dialogue are not only of those Ciceronians who had at least a transient fame, but also of some whom history does not even know.

In spite of this destructive satire, Giulio Camillo reaffirmed Ciceronianism with undisturbed simplicity.

Latin is no longer spoken, as our vernacular is, or French; it has been shut up in books. Since we are limited to gathering it not from actual speech, but from books, why not rather from the perfect than from the inferior? Let us first recall the language to the state in which we may believe it to have been while Vergil wrote it, or Cicero, and then confidently use that, even as Vergil did, or Cicero? (Trattato della imitatione, 1544.)

In 1545 Bartolomeo Ricci, tutor to Hercole d’Este’s son Lorenzo, closed his treatise De imitatione with a Ciceronian credo and a long defense of Longolius. Ciceronianism, then, survived both rebuttal and satire. As late as 1580 Muret, having renounced his own early Ciceronianism, attacked its major premise, the doctrine of the ideal great period. His argument is not, as Poliziano’s a hundred years before, pedagogical; it is a direct challenge to Renaissance competence in judging Latin style. His previous praelectio had urged the distinctive claims of Tacitus: practical philosophy, finished economy of style. This second lecture on Tacitus deals with objections. The preference for Suetonius he merely dismisses. But Tacitus is accused of inaccuracy. By whom? By Vopiscus; and who is Vopiscus? Tacitus is hostile to the Christian religion. Shall we rule out all the pagans? The rest of the lecture deals with style.

There remain two objections brought against Tacitus by the inexpert: that his style is obscure and rough, and that he does not write good Latin. When I hear complaints of the obscurity of Tacitus, I reflect how easily people transfer their own faults to others. [I remember the anecdote of the man who complained that the windows were too small, when the real trouble was his own failing sight. So a deaf man was heard to complain that people did not speak distinctly.]

But Tacitus, says another, is rough. Alciati, praising his friend Jovius, has not feared to call the histories of Tacitus thorny. Well, praising Jovius shows as much judgment as blaming Tacitus. No two could be more different. Tacitus could not but displease a man who made so much of Jovius.... For Jovius is all smooth; he has not a trace of that roughness which offends Alciati in Tacitus. He not only flows; he overflows.... As Alciati is afraid of roughness, I am sick of silliness. Sirup for babes; but let me have a bowl of something with a tang.

Finally, those who grant to Tacitus his other qualities still deplore his bad Latin. The first movers of this calumny, each of whom had spent much pains in expounding Tacitus, were Alciati and Ferret. If they themselves wrote Latin as well as they think, perhaps we might be disturbed by their authority. Do you make bold, some one may say, to judge such men? They have made bold to judge Tacitus.... [If we can know Latin (as Camillo says) only from books (and, we may add, from comparatively few books), we have the less warrant for judging Latin usage.]... Who dare affirm for certain today, when “the old authors” are so extolled, that the questioned phrases of Tacitus were never used by these “old authors?” (Leipzig ed. of 1660, vol. II, pp. 108-112.)

Even now, perhaps, though the name of the heresy has long been forgotten, the Ciceronian perversion of imitation is not extinct. But if this kind of imitation is not valid, what kinds are valid? Imitation of style may be suggestive when it remains subconscious, not the recalling of words, but the adaptation of remembered rhythms. The deliberate conformity proposed by Ciceronianism can be useful only as exercise, as the learning of certain effects by trying them. Once learned, these become an added resource in revision. In composing, in the creative process of bringing one’s message to one’s audience, deliberate imitation of style has no warrant. It would at least interrupt, and might deviate or inhibit. In so far as Ciceronianism confuses two processes normally separate, composing and revising, it tends to make style stilted.

Further, Ciceronianism narrows imitation by a theory of perfectionism. The Imitatio Christi (about 1460) is the direct appeal of an author preoccupied with his message. Sébastien Châteillon (1515-1563) rewrote its spontaneous Latin in Ciceronian cadences. It was imperfect; he would make it perfect. If this was pedantic, even absurd, wherein? If the Pilgrim’s Progress should not be rewritten in the style of Hooker or of Sir Thomas Browne, why? Because the one ideal style is an illusion.

Finally, imitation need not be of style; it may be of composition; and for writing addressed to an actual public this is at once more available and more promising. For real writing, that is for a message intended to move the public, imitation generally risks less, and gains more, in guiding the plan, the whole scheme, the sequence. Renaissance preoccupation with style and tolerance of published themes tended to obscure the larger opportunity.

But there is no Ciceronianism in Castiglione’s adopting the form of Cicero’s De oratore for his Cortegiano. Though he naturally shows awareness of Cicero’s expert periods, he is bent not on conformity of style, but on focusing the typical man of his own time in the literary frame used by Cicero for the typical Augustan Roman. Renaissance imitation of Vergil’s style was often futile; but Tasso’s Jerusalem was animated and guided by Vergil’s epic sequence. Robert Garnier, imitating the style of Euripides, missed the dramatic composition; but Corneille caught the whole scheme of a Greek tragedy. Such larger imitation imposes no restraint on originality. Its recognition of ancient achievement is in practical adaptation to one’s own conception and object and time. In this direction the classicism of the seventeenth century became more fruitful than that of the sixteenth.

3. RHETORICS

Manuals and treatises on rhetoric published in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries exhibit marked differences in tradition, scope, and tendency. They range from narrow concentration on style to a full treatment of the five parts of rhetoric. They exhibit sophistic as well as rhetoric. Some persist in medieval preconception as others recover the classical heritage of Aristotle and Quintilian. The works mentioned below are typical of the many Renaissance manuals.

The Rhetorica (1437?) of George of Trebizond shows in brief the whole classical scope:[22] inventio, the exploration of the subject and the determination of its status; dispositio, plan and order; elocutio, style; memoria, the art of holding a point for effective placing; and pronuntiatio, delivery. He is most expansive on the first, which had been both neglected and misapplied by the Middle Age.[23]

The presentation of rhetoric by Juan Luis Vives (De ratione dicendi, Bruges, 1532; reprinted in Vol. II of the Majansius edition of his works) is both meager and vaguely general.

Vives urges that rhetoric is not a study for boys, and that it should not be confined to diction. But he himself offers hardly anything specific about composition. Book I deals mainly with sentences (compositio), e.g., with dilation and conciseness as in the Copia of Erasmus, and with the period. Book II offers brief generalizations on type or tone of style, on the conventionalized measure of native ability against study and revision, on consideration of emotions and moral habits, on the threefold task of instructing, winning, and moving, and on appropriateness. Book III deals with narration (history, exempla, fables, poetry), paraphrase, epitome, commentary. History as composition is hardly even considered.

His incidental discussion of rhetoric in De causis corruptarum artium and De tradendis disciplinis (Vol. VI of the collective edition) is no more satisfying. In Book IV of the former Vives so far misconceives the classical inventio as to rule it out of rhetoric altogether. Thus he practically ratifies the procedure of those Renaissance logicians who classified inventio and dispositio under logic. The classification was not a reform; it merely recorded tardily the medieval practice of reducing rhetoric to style by relying for all the active work of composition on debate. Yet Vives pays repeated homage to both Aristotle and Quintilian.

On the other hand the concise manual of Joannes Caesarius (Rhetorica, Paris, 1542) returns to the full classical scope. The source cited most explicitly and quoted most frequently is Quintilian.

But that later ancient tradition called sophistic, which had deviated the rhetoric of the Middle Age, had also its Renaissance revival. Giulio Camillo (1479-1550), known in France as well as in Italy, published together a treatise on the orator’s material, the oratorical fund, and another on imitation (Due trattati ... l’uno delle materie che possono venir sotto lo stile dell’eloquente, l’altro della imitatione, Venice, 1544-1545). His constant preoccupation is with the topics, headings, commonplaces (loci) which guide the writer’s preparation. Such are the headings of the sophistic recipe for encomium: birth and family, native city, deeds, etc. But sophistic had elaborated such obvious suggestions for exploring one’s material into a system applicable both to material and to style. Camillo’s source is:

the Ideas of Hermogenes, who in each considers eight things: the sense, the method, the words, the verbal figures, the clauses, their combination, sentence-control (fermezza), and rhythm. But my method is perhaps easier, since I proceed not from the forms (forme) to the materials, but from the materials to the forms.... I have sought how many things can combine to produce the forms, and I find (as I have argued in my Latin orations) not eight things, as Hermogenes writes, but fourteen which may enter to modify any material. They are these: conceptions, or inventions (Trovati), passions, commonplaces, ways of speaking (le vie del dire), arguments, order, words, verbal figures, clauses, connectives, sentence forms, cadence (gli estremi), rhythms, harmonies.

This bewildering cross-division might serve as the reductio ad absurdum of the system of bringing on eloquence by topics if Camillo had not gone even further in a grandiose symbolistic scheme entitled L’idea del theatro (Florence, 1550). The theater here is not any actual stage; it is the manifold pageant of the world presented allegorically by topics for all literary purposes.

Starting from the medieval, or perhaps the neo-Platonic, premise that sacred things are not revealed, but figured, he divides his book into seven gradi. Seven is the perfect number; e.g., seven planets, Isaiah’s seven columns, Vergil’s terque quaterque, etc. Each grado is named after a planet, whose attributes are a mixture of astrology and mythology, as in the Middle Age, but again with a suggestion of orientalized Platonism. This general scheme constitutes the first section. The second is entitled Il convivio; the third, l’Antro; etc. A figure may appear in more than one grado.

Referring to this book in his treatise on imitation, he says: “By topics and images I have arranged all the headings that may suffice to group and to subserve all human conceptions.” In the same treatise he even thinks of painting and sculpture as proceeding by topics: genus, sex, age, function, anatomy, light and shadow, attitude and action, adaptation to place. Topics can no farther go. Camillo’s system, moreover, hardly touches composition; all its manifold application is to style. Thus the more readily he accepts the common Renaissance confusion of poetic with rhetoric.

Another Ciceronian treatise on imitation is Bartolomeo Ricci’s (Bartholomaei Riccii de imitatione libri tres ad Alfonsum Atestium Principem, suum in literis alumnum, Herculis II Ferrariensium Principis filium ... Venice, 1545). Written ostensibly for the guidance of his pupil Alfonso, it is a discussion, not a textbook; but in the back of the author’s mind is the prevalent conception of writing Latin as writing themes. The examples quote prose and poetry side by side without distinction of poetic from rhetoric. The usual complimentary references to contemporaries and to recognized previous humanists give the schoolmaster opportunity to exhibit his wide acquaintance. Poliziano is cited as challenging imitation; but his arguments are not given, nor the fact that his challenge was of Ciceronianism. Instead of citing his letter to Cortesi, Ricci merely praises Cortesi’s reply as elegant. The Ciceronianus of Erasmus is similarly dismissed as an attack on Longueil. The progress of the book is generally from definition of imitation (I) through application of it in composition (II) to application in style (III). Ciceronianism, implied throughout, first in classicism, then by increasing use of Cicero as a model, is explicitly declared in III and supported by a long defense of Longueil.

I. Imitation, practiced in all human activities, is accepted in literature. Though Catullus in the marriage of Thetis and in the desolation of Ariadne said the last word and every word, nevertheless Vergil imitated him in Dido; and each has his own merits. [The Catullus passages are stock citations of the period.] Cicero and Vergil both counseled and practiced imitation. Why reduce following nature to following yourself? Following nature demands no more than being natural, i.e., verisimilitude. [The quibble here between nature in the sense of human nature and nature in the sense of one’s own nature (ingenium) is unpardonable. Further, it is not clear what either has to do with imitation.] Imitate the best authors, each in his own kind. There follows a summary of Latin literature. [The book supplies no distinct definition of imitation as a means of advancing literary control. It shows, quite superfluously, that imitation is prevalent in the arts; it does not define the limits and the methods of practicing it in writing.]

II. A review of the revival of Augustan diction in a long list of humanists proves nothing specific concerning imitation, much concerning pride in humanistic Latin. Scholars, however, are not well paid. Doctors and lawyers write bad Latin. Teachers are incompetent. The vernacular has come even into the schools; and even Cicero is translated. Let us all combine to save Latin style. Imitation is not repetition, not copy; there must be variation. Imitation with Plautus and Terence was the taking of Greek plots Pharmaceutria of Theocritus. [He did not imitate it.] Vergil’s use of Cato and Varro adds beauty of style. [Is this imitation, or simply use of material?] Sallust’s Catiline is admirable; but it did not preclude Cicero’s. So, even after Lucretius, Ovid and Vergil treated the gods. [Here is mere confusion. Cicero did not imitate Sallust; he wrote on the same subject.] The exposure of Andromeda is told by Manilius, Ovid, and Pontanus; and the last did it best. Comparison of Vergil’s Dido with the Ariadne of Catullus is followed by another comparatio without enlightening us as to the nature or the method of imitation. Rehearsal of literary forms (history, exposition, pleading) leads to the assertion that Cicero is the best model in all three styles.

III. Let us take Cicero, then, for our model. Proverbs, epigrams, definitions may be lifted as familiar enough to be common property. How to make variations on the model is exemplified abundantly in sentence form and in diction by both prose and verse. The book closes with many analyzed examples from Longueil, to rebut the charge that his writing is mere cento, or pastiche, and to exhibit him as the perfect Ciceronian. Ricci appends a practical hint from his own experience. His habit is to start boys with Terence because the plots are interesting, then to add some Cicero, and finally to give them Cicero alone.

The demonstration of Longueil’s eloquence is rather an epilogue than a conclusion. It does not suffice to justify Ciceronianism, much less to explain imitation. The character of imitation, its limits, its profitable methods, are left still vague.

Of the same year is Bernardino Tomitano’s Discussions of Tuscan (Ragionamenti della lingua toscana ... Venice, 1545). The sub-title goes on: “wherein the talk is of the perfect vernacular orator and poet ... divided into three books. In the first, philosophy is proved necessary to the acquisition of rhetoric and poetic; in the second are set forth the precepts of the orator; and in the third, the laws pertaining to the poet and to good writing in both prose and verse.”

A dialogue in form, with an academy setting, this is largely a monologue by Speroni with interruptions, and is devoted mainly to “the perfect orator and poet.” The book is a stilted and diffuse digest of conventional rhetoric jumbled with poetic, with examples under each conventional heading. Petrarch is made the exemplar of everything, even of argumentation. The idea of poetic as a distinct mode of composition never even enters.

I. Sperone Speroni, the protagonist, is made to repeat his contention that language study is not the gateway to philosophy and his epigram: “things make men wise; words make them seem so.” Tomitano apparently takes him to mean that philosophy feeds style, not style philosophy; for Tomitano goes on to exhibit Petrarch as full of philosophy and perfect in style. Dante is less careful, but Petrarch is a treasury for all writers.

II. The anxiety to exhibit Petrarch leads to strange rendering of the conventional divisions of rhetoric. Inventio, “first of those five strings on which the orator makes smoothest harmony,” is “imagining things that have truth, or at least verisimilitude,” and is forthwith confused with dispositio (compartimento). Petrarch exemplifies not only exordium and narratio, but even proof and rebuttal. Of the “three styles” of oratory the highest is Boccaccio’s in Fiammetta, the median in the Decameron. But since among verse forms the highest are canzone, sestina, and madriale; the plainest, ballata, stanza, and capitolo; the sonnet, Petrarch’s favorite form, must be median. Under style the doctrine of “tone-color” is easily reduced to unintentional absurdity.

III. The distinction of poet from orator is discovered at great length to be—verse. The Ferrarese are best in comedies, the Venetians in sonnets, the Marchigiani in capitoli, they of Vicenza in ballate, the Romans in odes and hymns, the Paduans in tragedies, the Florentines in blank verse. Inventio in poetry is the rehearsal of myths, of which the poet is lord and guardian. An interruption! How can you put Petrarch above Dante when you began by urging that the poet should be a philosopher? Answer (240): Petrarch had all the philosophy he needed, and used it more poetically. Though Dante was the greater philosopher, Petrarch was the better poet. When Aristotle calls Sophocles more perfect than Euripides, he does not mean in style [!]. In poetry dispositio is evenness, consistency, harmony; and narratio has the same rules as in oratory. Horace’s precepts, to begin in mediis, to combine instruction with charm, to seek advice, and to revise, are all repeated. On a request for more about style follows a discussion of words, simple and compound, proper and figurative, new and old. Finally the company joins in citing many examples.

Having run out of headings, Tomitano thus runs down. He had not in the least profited by the revival of Cicero and Quintilian.

Renaissance Platonism, disputing Aristotle’s philosophy, attacked also his rhetoric. Francesco Patrizzi (1529-1597) published in his youth a collection of ten vernacular dialogues on rhetoric (Della retorica, dieci dialoghi, Venice, 1552), “in which,” the sub-title adds, “the talk is of the art of oratory, with reasons impugning the opinion held of it by ancient writers.” The Platonic dialogue, followed superficially, is quite beyond Patrizzi’s achievement. Discussing oratory (I) at large, he goes on to its materials (II, III, IV), its ornaments (V), its divisions (VI), the quality of the orator (VII), the art of oratory (VIII), the perfect rhetoric (IX), and rhetorical amplification (X). Evidently neither a logical division nor a sequence, these categories are rather successive openings for attack. Patrizzi appears not only as a Platonist, but as an anti-Aristotelian. His main quarrels are with the scope of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, with the doctrine of imitation, and with making rhetoric an art.

As to scope and materials Aristotle is inconsistent. He says both that the orator has no material and that he has all materials (25). Why, then, did he spend most of his Rhetoric on teaching the materials, slighting the ends, the ideas, the forms, the instruments, and omitting status? [The misinterpretation amounts to gross misstatement.] Perhaps we lack any clear definition of the orator because professors insist on including under a single word all sorts of discourse (27). Even the oratorical ornaments are not peculiar to the orator. His materials are the same as the economist’s, the historian’s, the poet’s (37). Having given oratory so much scope, how can Aristotle restrict it to three kinds? (60). [Evidently superficial, this is rather quarrel and quibble than refutation.]

As to imitation, Patrizzi holds that a painter represents not his conception (concetto), but the objects themselves

Similarly he finds that rhetoric is not an art because Plato says it is merely a skill (peritia).

The significance of this work is that in 1552 a Venetian seeking recognition at twenty-two could use some distinguished names in dialogues smartly rapping Aristotle, and even find a publisher.

The English rhetoric of Thomas Wilson (The art of rhetorique, for the use of all such as are studious of eloquence, set forth in English, London, 1553 [reprinted down to 1593; ed. G. H. Mair, Oxford, 1909]) covers the ancient scheme practically, using Cicero and Quintilian as well as the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and deriving much from Erasmus.

The Partitiones oratoriae (Venice and Paris, 1558) of Jacopo Brocardo is exactly described by its sub-title as elegans et dilucida paraphrasis of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Now translating, now paraphrasing, it provides in its marginal headings a sufficient table of contents.

But the revival of the full classical tradition is most obvious in the comprehensive Italian rhetoric of Bartolomeo Cavalcanti (La retorica, 1555; second edition, Venice, 1558/9, reprinted Pesaro, 1574). Through 563 closely printed pages this is strictly and consistently a rhetoric of the classical character and scope. The exceptional avoidance of confusion with poetic appears in the bare mention of Vergil and in the ousting of Petrarch from his monopoly as exemplar of everything desirable in prose as well as in verse. Plato is rare; Plutarch, rarer. The main body of analyzed examples is from the orations of Cicero. Demosthenes is only less frequent. From Livy and Thucydides the examples are usually of the imaginary harangues to troops. All the examples that are not themselves Italian are translated. Hermogenes is cited some half-dozen times; Quintilian, twice as often; but the main source of doctrine is the Rhetoric of Aristotle and, next to that, his Logic. The book is constantly and consistently Aristotelian.

Instead of devoting himself after the Renaissance habit mainly to style, Cavalcanti gives it only one of his seven books (V). All the rest are spent on composition. Book I is a lucid survey of the field; II shows the ways of inventio in each of the three types of oratory; III deals with argument; IV, with appeal to emotion and to moral habit; V, besides the usual lists of figures, has an unusually definite treatment of sentence management (compositio) and a meager summary of dispositio; VI presents the typical parts of an oration, avoiding the common confusion of narratio (statement of the facts) with narrative; VII deals with confirmation and conclusion. Its incidental recurrence to dispositio is again vague. Cavalcanti had excuse enough in the ancient tradition, which is generally weakest in its counsels for sequence.

Fortunately Cavalcanti’s own plan is clear and fairly progressive; and his adjustment to his own time appears in the prominence given to the third of the ancient types of oratory, such speeches on occasion as were the main Renaissance field. His defect is the common Renaissance vice of diffuseness. Beyond its intrinsic value Cavalcanti’s Retorica has historical significance. It gave the wider audience a just and distinct view of classical rhetoric.

The sixteenth century closed with the full classical doctrine operative in the Ratio studiorum and in the Rhetoric of Soarez.

Chapter IV
IMITATION IN LYRIC AND PASTORAL

1. LYRIC

The lyrics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries show an extensive revival of Augustan measures in Latin. Meantime imitation of Petrarch made him an Italian classic and a European model. Thus, in England, revival from a meager and languid fifteenth century was stimulated in the sixteenth by Italy. But France shows the history of vernacular lyric in clearest stages: (1) in the formalizing of medieval modes by the rhétoriqueurs; (2) in the verse forms and diction of Lemaire and Marot, seeking variety without rejecting tradition; (3) in the Pléiade program of revolt from tradition to classicism, and especially in Ronsard’s experiments with the Greek ode; (4) in the final predominance of the sonnet.

(a) Latin Lyric

Latin lyric was both changed in mode by the Renaissance and increased in volume. The fifteenth century turned from the modes of the medieval Latin lyric to more direct imitation of Vergil and Ovid, Catullus and Horace. Meantime the tradition of writing Latin verse in school continued to make every Renaissance author familiar with this metric. The difference was that he now used it in his own mature composition. For humanism demanded even of vernacular poets such Latin stanzas as might introduce the works of their friends, compliment their patrons, or celebrate state weddings, victories, and solemn entries. Though even published Latin lyrics were often themes, they at least promoted and confirmed two pervasive Renaissance literary habits: control of classical metric, and imitation. Throughout the Renaissance there is to be assumed in the back of a poet’s mind a fund of classical measures and phrases.

But Renaissance Latin lyrics are by no means all themes. For some poets Latin was really the lyric medium. Humanistic anxiety and pretense about classical diction might, indeed, hinder lyric, but could not suppress it. Pontano (1426-1503), whose Latin poems fill nearly seven hundred modern pages, wrote not a few as directly and utterly lyrical as his Naenia. Jan Everaerts of Mechlin, known to literature as Secundus (1511-1536), even started a lyric vogue in Italy and France, and later in England, with his Basia. Obviously inspired by Catullus, they had a quality and influence of their own.

(b) Italy and England

The progress of vernacular lyric was steadiest in Italy because there the vernacular triumph had been recognized earliest and most consistently. The medieval lyric forms derived generically from Provençal—canzone, ballata, sestina, and sonetto—had all been explored by Dante; and one of them, the sonnet, had received from Petrarch a stamp that gave it European currency. Beside the humanist cult of Augustan Latin rose a cult of Petrarch as a vernacular classic. From Petrarch himself and through his fifteenth-century imitators the sonnet became the most widespread lyric mode both for a single, self-sufficient lyric and as a lyric unit in a narrative chain.

In England, where the range of medieval stanzas had been narrower, fifteenth-century lyric was meager. “The age of transition,” as it has been called apologetically, was a period of medieval decadence, of stalling in medieval patterns. Without much stir of ideas, without general sureness in verse technic, it is often diffuse and straggling, as in Lydgate. Skelton’s Latin learning remained quite apart from his slack and boisterous English verse; and English fifteenth-century lyric generally is both conventional and feeble. The sixteenth-century revival that was sought in Petrarch led here, as elsewhere, to the prevalence of sonnets. Its pioneer was Sir Thomas Wiat (1503-1542). Starting with that connection of lyric with music which was to be a preoccupation of Ronsard, appreciating Chaucer, but reading him in imperfect texts, he turned early from a few rondeaux of the Marot type to the Petrarchan sonnet. Two thirds of his sonnets are translations or echoes of Petrarch himself, or are derived from his imitators. Wiat pursued Italian further in octaves and terza rima and seems to have read, besides Ariosto, Alamanni, Navagero, and Castiglione, the Poetica of Trissino (1529). The previous century had brought Italian influences on English learning; Wiat brought the first clearly literary influence since Boccaccio’s on Chaucer. His friend Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), carried this forward. Similarly following Petrarch and the Petrarchans, and experimenting with terza rima and other stanzas, he made Italian metric more familiar, and in particular helped to establish among the Elizabethans that form of sonnet which is called Shaksperian.

(c) France

France shows most distinctly the whole Renaissance lyric history. The beginning of the history in the medieval vernacular art of refrain stanzas had shown there the most systematic elaboration. In 1501 Antoine Vérard printed at Paris the huge collection of balades, rondeaux, and virelais entitled Le jardin de plaisance et fleur de rhétorique. Rhétorique, or more specifically seconde rhétorique, means the art of verse; the introduction expounds this in an anonymous treatise. Pierre Fabri incorporated the treatise in his Grande et vraie art de pleine rhétorique (Rouen, 1521). The pleine signifies merely the inclusion of both prose (Part I) and verse (Part II). Fullness in any other sense is hardly to be found in the rhétoriques of the period. They furnish mainly figures of speech and verse forms. They are style books; for the so-called school of the rhétoriqueurs was devoted mainly to verbal and metrical ingenuities.

But as Villon had shown in the early fifteenth century that the balade was not dead, so as the century waned Jean Lemaire (1473 to about 1520) was poet enough to be more than rhétoriqueur. True, he continued the jingling iteration. A double virelay composed on two rhymes begins as follows:

Hautains esprits du grand royal pourpris,

Je suis épris par mouvements certains

De bien servir la reine de haut prix.

Mais trop surpris est mon coeur malappris ... (p. 128).[24]

But Lemaire usually handled such recurrences with more delicacy.

Notre âge est bref comme les fleurs

Dont les couleurs reluisent peu d’espace.

Le temps est court et tout rempli de pleurs

Et de douleurs, qui tout voit et compasse.

Joie se passe; on s’ébat, on solasse

Et entrelace un peu de miel bénin

Avec l’amer du monde et le venin ... (p. 17).

Using few of the popular medieval stanzas, he acknowledged Petrarch and Serafino d’Aquila (p. 238), composed the first part of his Concorde des deux langages in terza rima, and experimented with Alexandrines. The “enrichment” later proposed by Du Bellay he tried in such Latinisms as aurein, calefaction, collocution, oscultation, congelative, and glandifère. Bits of his pastoral decoration might have been written in the Pléiade.

A son venir Faunes l’ont adoré,

Satyres, Pans, Aegipans, dieux agrestes,

Et Sylvanus, par les bois honoré;

Nymphes aussi, diligentes et prestes,

A la déesse ont offert leur service,

Tout à l’entour faisant danses et festes.

Les Napées, exerçant leur office,

Font bouillonner fontaines argentines,

Créant un bruit à sommeil très propice.

Puis à dresser les tentes célestines

Ont mis leur soin les mignonnes Dryades,

Faisant de bois ombrageuses courtines.

(Concorde des deux langages, p. 243).

But the whole allegorical scheme of that poem is as medieval as Chaucer’s in the Parlement of Foules. For Lemaire still uses mythology not for classical allusion, but medievally as an extension of allegory. Chaos and the Furies, Hymen, Erebus, Mercury, and Janus are listed (pp. 172-173) with the personifications Honor, Grace, Victory, and Discord. The medieval adaptation brings from the Roman de la Rose Bel-Accueil to be a sub-deacon in the temple of Venus (p. 252); for the temple, as in Chaucer, is a church and has relics. Even Hippolytus is a “saint martyr” (p. 223); and the three goddesses at the judgment of Paris are domesticated in Flanders by their “venustes corpulences.” Jean Lemaire was not a forerunner of classicism.

Nor was Clement Marot (1495-1544). He learned the sonnet in Lyon and in Italy without discerning either its distinctive value or its future. For him it was merely one more form of the epigram type seen also in the dizaine. He continued the balade, adapted the rondeau, wrote much encomium without ever proclaiming himself a vates. His epistles, elegies, epigrams, his experiments with Alexandrines, his imitations of Martial, suggest a more normal development than the Pléiade change of both emphasis and direction.[25]

For the new day of the sonnet at Lyon we must look to Louise Labé (about 1520-1566). Bourgeoise of the commercial and literary, French and Italian city of Lyon, composing sometimes in Italian and sometimes in French, she speaks the choice language of culture without parade. Her sonnets[26] are directly and utterly lyric. Their literary derivations may, indeed, be found, but are never put forward. Her few classical allusions are all familiar. The simple mythology of her prose Débat de Folie et d’Amour is handled in the Burgundian fashion of Jean Lemaire. Her verse is Petrarchan as it were inevitably, because that was the prevalent mode of her place and time. To call her a precursor of the Pléiade, then, may be quite misleading; for she suggests neither school nor date.

French humanism had still to attempt a stricter classicism, not adapting but imitating, not domesticating but importing. Ancient gods were to be recalled in the style of Vergil or of Ovid. Odes were to be Horatian, and might be Pindaric. Lyric diction was to be “enriched” by the interweaving of correct allusions in classical phrase. The allusive value would thus be heightened by summoning the hearer’s culture to answer the poet’s. Since poetry would be elevated by becoming learned, poets should be docte. As for readers insufficiently educated, they were not to be considered. Ronsard repeated Horace’s Odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Let the poet seek “fit audience, though few.” This whole theory of poetic allusion seems to our age exploded. It comes to us through that standardized eighteenth-century poetic diction which was repudiated by the romantic revolt. Modern readers, consequently out of tune, must approach many Renaissance lyrics with a resolution of tolerance. Aurora leaving the bed of Tithonus, though mere decoration in Vergil and somewhat faded in the Middle Age, was not yet stale to the increasing audience of the sixteenth century. But if the allusion, far from being stale, were unfamiliar, even recondite? Instead of rejecting classical allusions a priori as hindrances to lyric, we may learn to estimate their value from actual Renaissance experience. That the language of poetry should be reminiscent of Greece and Rome was a Renaissance postulate.

Ronsard’s early classicism, revolting from prolonged rhétorique, was reminiscent of Vergil and Ovid of course, of Catullus and his imitator Secundus, sometimes of Claudian and Pontano, but mainly of the Odes of Horace. Sometimes he even paraphrases, as when he composes a French Fons Bandusiae; often he adapts phrases; oftenest he follows the Horatian lyric movement. If he occasionally condescends to a medieval form, he gives it classical style. Further, his study of Greek under Dorat led him to imitate Callimachus and then Pindar. The reminiscences of Callimachus hardly go beyond the usual Renaissance lifting of phrase or allusion, that verbal classicism which was the habit of the time; but from Pindar he learned something different.

The extant poetry of Pindar is almost all encomium of victors at the pan-Hellenic contests. Encomium was a poetic fashion in the Renaissance too, because it was a means of publication. The Greeks had justified it by the poet’s mission to confer fame. Though Ronsard adopts the idea in haughty proclamation of his own high function, he had already ancient warrant enough in Horace. What he learned further from Pindar was technical, a wider range of lyric composition. Encomium, reduced to recipe in late Greek oratory, took definite form earlier in Greek poetry. The main topics for the Pindaric celebration of an Olympian victor are his family line and his native city. Each of these is carried into legend and myth, either by allusions to what the pan-Hellenic audience knew as common tradition, or in the longer odes by verse narrative. The poem often ended on exhortation to live worthily of past and present fame. These conventional motives Pindar carried out metrically in a sequence of strophes and antistrophes. Without examining how strictly Ronsard followed the Greek mode, it is enough to say that his French adaptation proceeds by triads: strophe, antistrophe, epode. Though he usually followed Pindar’s shorter odes, his Ode to the King on the Peace (1550) has ten triads; his Ode to Michel de l’Hospital (1550), twenty-four. In the latter the young Muses sing to Jupiter the battle of the Olympians with the Titans; and there follows an historical vision of the progress of poesy. Thus the Greek scheme invited Ronsard to wider adventures in metric, to more remote recurrences and larger lyric harmonies than were offered by Horace.

Though the metrical experiment ceased abruptly with Ronsard in 1550, it had later fruit in Spenser. Longer poems of occasion, thus introduced from the Greek by so skillful a metrist, were carried by the Pléiade influence to England. But Spenser’s Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion, instead of conforming specifically to Ronsard’s verse system, follow more generally and more variously the idea of larger metrical reach by framing a stanza of eighteen lines.[27]

Why did Ronsard drop such measures in 1550 at the age of twenty-seven? The Pindaric ode recurs sporadically in vernacular poetry, and occasionally has had a limited vogue. More or less Greek, it is often, as with Ronsard, learned and often pretentious with airs of inspiration. One of its rare successes came more than two centuries later in England with Gray. It has never kept its hold in lyric poetry. Ronsard continued to print his Pindarics among his collected poems; but he never again composed in those lyric modes. Had he found them intractable to his language or to his own bent? Having pushed allusiveness beyond the ken of any considerable audience, had he learned that lyric is remote at its peril? We may guess part of the answer from the times.

Renaissance lyric thrived on learning so long as it was addressed to a special audience and sought reputation with patrons to whom learning might be useful in their dependents. The poet courtier naturally flattered princes or their ministers by assuming their familiarity with the classics as he displayed his own. But the printers had been widening the audience. Though 1550 was too early for what we now call a reading public, there was a widening circle, especially in the commercial cities, of readers who had some culture and desired more. Poets could begin to address these directly. Forty years later Spenser, still practicing encomium to win a position in which he could write, felt an English reading public and harmonized a long stanza without exhibiting Greek metric. Though Renaissance lyric remained largely aristocratic, even Ronsard, aristocrat himself, might find the mission of dispensing fame smaller than the opportunity of wider hearing.

For such wider appeal the readiest mode was the sonnet. Accepting Marot’s scheme, Ronsard restricted his own practice to a few types especially suited to music. In thus using the new polyphonic art of voice with string accompaniment he applied the ancient idea of a sung lyric to the actual singing of his time. Modulating his many sonnets expertly, he showed equal control in other stanzas. That these familiar forms became a fitter pattern for Ronsard than the ode seems to us demonstrated by literary history. His Pindarics have been relegated to the museum; his more acclimated Horatian odes have been neglected; but time has not dimmed:

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir à la chandelle,

Assise auprès du feu, deuidant & filant,

Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerueillant,

Ronsard me celebroit du temps que i’estois belle.

Lors vous n’aurez seruante oyant telle nouuelle,

Desia sous le labeur à demy sommeillant,

Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille resueillant,

Benissant vostre nom de louange immortelle.

Ie seray sous la terre & fantôme sans os

Par les ombres myrteux ie prendray mon repos:

Vous serez au fouyer vne vieille accroupie,

Regrettant mon amour & vostre fier desdain.

Viuez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain:

Cueillez dés auiourdhuy les roses de la vie.[28]

Life is short; “gather ye roses while ye may”; the theme is perennial, a lyric commonplace. The rendering of it has often been conventional, but often, as here, individual because intensely realized. The sonnet is direct, immediate, in renouncing all elaboration and all distraction. There are no allusions, only images. Candlelight, hearth, loom, song, spoken words, are the sharper because they are unmodified. There are few adjectives. The lyric is simplified. But the images of attitude and gesture are iterated to lead the mood: “assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,” “à demi sommeillant ... réveillant,” “accroupie.” This is the diction of the lyrics that have no date. For the point is not the abstract superiority of the sonnet as a verse form; it is the appeal of form and diction alike to a wider audience, the communication of poetry rather than its exhibition. Ronsard shows this power of direct appeal in his equally popular Mignonne, allons voir si la rose. Included in his first book of odes, this has no Greek strangeness. By 1550, having explored more remote modes to answer the special demand of his circle and his own bent toward learning, he returned to the lyric forms that had become familiar.

The sonnet sequence, the use of the sonnet as a lyric unit in a progress suggesting narrative, was more distinctly developed in England. Though Ronsard’s sonnets appear in series, as addressed to Cassandre, Marie, or Hélène, the enchaining is more evident in Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella and in Shakspere. Spenser, fully aware of the Pléiade, gave himself no such strict schooling as Ronsard’s. He usually stopped short of ancient stanza and of borrowed phrase. But he relied longer on mythological allusions. Thus he decorated not only the Faerie Queene, but even his lyric triumph, the Epithalamion. Ronsard’s later verse makes slighter and more considerate use of such ornament; Spenser’s last poem still turns to the nymphs, to Jupiter and Leda, and to Hesper. The Renaissance lyric experience may be summed up in these two poets. Devoted to national revival of vernacular poetry, nourished by Latin and by Greek antiquity, expert metrists, they show together the limits of imitative classicism. Responding to the special demands of their time, they used the classics to certify their learning. Thus their lyric medium was surcharged. Its forms were sometimes so strange, its diction often so overloaded, as to sacrifice lyric directness, especially the immediate transmission of sensations. Lyric allusiveness was pushed beyond its lyric value. With lesser poets it often sufficed as an end in itself. Renaissance “enrichment” often became mere decorative dilation. But Ronsard, and then Spenser, lived to fuse their experience of classicism in their appeal to coming lovers of poetry.

2. PASTORAL

Pastoral is an old dream. Classified by modern psychology as escape, it has been in various forms the poetry of the city wistful for the country. The word, denoting shepherds, at the same time connotes that its shepherds are not real, but fictitious. Whether allegorized or otherwise manipulated, they are not the actual men who throughout history have tended beasts by day and night in the open, not actual Sicilians, not even the shepherds who in the Nativity plays brought English toys to the infant Saviour. All these are real; the shepherds of pastoral, wearing shepherd’s clothes, sing other songs. Artificial, indeed, pastoral has often been, and is easily, but not always, not necessarily. The city dream of the country “simple life” is after all a recurrent fact. Though it may be sentimentalized, conventionalized, rhetoricated, so may the other dreams. Instead of ruling out this one, we may examine its literary vitality. Besides, it has a special claim. Pastoral, ranging all the way from lyric through narrative to dramatic, and from Alexandrian Greek to Elizabethan English, offered in its Renaissance vogue a wide school of imitation.

Renaissance taste in Greek inclined to that later literature called Alexandrian: to neo-Platonism, to the rhetoric of Hermogenes, to Callimachus oftener than to Pindar, to the Byzantine imitators of Anacreon and the Byzantine Anthology of epigrams, to the descriptive show-pieces inserted in that late oratory called sophistic and in the “Greek Romances,” both the long melodramas narrated by Apollonius, Heliodorus, and Tatius and the idyllic Daphnis and Chloe of that Longus who was called “the sophist.” But the Renaissance literary creed for Latin was classicism. Inclined rather to the dilation of such later poets as Lucan, and even to Ausonius and Claudian, the Renaissance professed its faith in the artistic restraint of Vergil. Now pastoral had the promise of reconciling Alexandria with imperial Rome. It could turn for decoration both to the sophists and to Ovid. It was both Theocritus and Vergil.

The extant poems of Theocritus are by no means all pastoral. Called Idylls, that is little poems, they are love lyrics (II, III, XX); epigrams, that is, inscriptions of the sort collected in the Anthology (XXVIII and the following); myths (I in part, XI, XIII, XXIV-V); encomia (XIV in part, XVI-XVIII, XXII); and mimes, that is, dramatic dialogues (X, XV). Only seven of those that are surely his are such poetry-matches between shepherds as came to be called eclogues (I, IV-VII, X in part, XIV). Though this charming variety has suggested to modern critics hints for later pastoral development, especially toward drama, the vivacious realistic dialogue (XV) between two city women at the festival of Adonis is essentially different from pastoral. Nor is it true to either poet to say that pastoral with Theocritus was fresh and natural; with Vergil it became artificial. Both poets knew the country, Vergil apparently better than Theocritus; but neither gives it that direct, immediate expression which in modern times has been called nature poetry. Theocritus is specific with wild olive, peas, and acorns; sometimes concrete with a smoky hen-roost, waving green leaves, or a crested lark. For an Alexandrian he is exceptionally free from the dilation of descriptive show-pieces; but he has the Alexandrian habit of seeing nature through art. Gorgo and Praxinoa (XV) are conveyed by their chatter; and the dirge to Adonis describes the putti on the ceremonial coverlet as like fledgling nightingales trying their wings. Sicily is romantic for us with blue sea, wild uplands, and volcanic steeps. The shepherds of Theocritus live nearer to sophisticated Syracuse or Agrigentum, or to the other western cities of ancient Greece. Unlike enough otherwise, Theocritus and Vergil are alike in viewing the country through the eyes of the city.

The Bucolics of Vergil established pastoral in its most familiar pattern. One of the few schoolbooks to hold their place from ancient into modern times, they have drilled into successive thousands the poetic scheme of a lyric contest for some rustic prize, and the idea that this contest, symbolizing some other more momentous, may express the poet’s own hopes and fears. Thus in school, as from time immemorial boys got their first notions of worldly wisdom by memorizing Latin beast-fables, so they learned Latin grammar, with Latin verse, from shepherd rivalries typifying wider struggles. Since many Renaissance boys continued to imitate the Bucolics when they grew up, many Renaissance eclogues are published themes. That Vergil’s eclogues have survived all this is evidence of immortality. They need no further praise; but having been used for grammar, they need to be read again for poetry and for literary history.

The inspiration of Theocritus, gracefully acknowledged by Vergil (IV, VI, X), is hardly of style. The avoidance of descriptive dilation, the preference of specific indication to ornament, are Vergil’s own choice.

Pauperis et tuguri congestum caespite culmen (I. 69)

More characteristic of his economy is his use of concrete predicates.

Molli paulatim flavescet campus arista,

Incultisque rubens pendebit sentibus uva;

Et durae quercus sudabunt roscida mella (IV. 28).

More concise than Theocritus in style, and graver, he is quite independent in composition. The Pharmaceutria (VIII) owes to the second idyll of Theocritus little but the subject. The encomium of Pollio (IV), instead of following the sophistic recipe item by item, selects and weaves into an integrated vision of the Golden Age. But such economy of phrase and movement seems to have had less influence in making his eclogues models than his use of shepherd rivalries to suggest larger struggles and personal concerns.

Moralized eclogue was familiar from the schoolbook called Auctores octo. As used at Troyes in 1436, this collection contained, with an Isopet (Aesop’s fables), a Cathonet (maxims of Cato), and other medieval compends, a Théodolet. The work thus familiarly styled is Theodulus (or Liber Theoduli), ecloga qua comparantur miracula Veteris Testamenti cum veterum poetarum commentis. It matches pagan with Christian instances in a contest of Falsehood (Pseustis) with Truth (Alethia) which is judged by Reason (Phronesis). Probably of the ninth century, it was printed as late as the sixteenth.[29] Literary use of Latin eclogues during the intervening centuries is sufficiently indicated by Dante’s in reply to Giovanni di Virgilio. Petrarch’s Vergilian Bucolicum carmen expresses the actual conflict of Christian with pagan poetry. Boccaccio’s eclogues are less distinctive than his Italian prose narrative Ameto. Though this is far longer than any previous pastoral and is dilated with lavish description, it must be remembered not only for its pastoral setting, but for its alternations of verse and for its myth. The successive interviews of the shepherd with the nymphs and demigoddesses symbolize the progress from earthly to heavenly love.[30]

But humanism must have its own eclogues and its own symbolism. The eclogues (1498) of Mantuan (Baptista Spagnolo, known as Mantuanus, 1448-1513) were lifted out of the humanist throng by being adopted for use in school. The imitation thus invited through some two hundred years was the easier because they are far less concise than Vergil’s. Vicar General of the Carmelites, Mantuan doubtless owed some of his vogue to his edification. Nevertheless he admits that classicizing which Erasmus attacked later as paganizing: Tonans, for instance, or Regnator Olympi for God. Eclogue III presents the convention of hopeless, ill-starred love; IX, the conventional contrast of country to city; but X makes the shepherds debate the actual controversy over the Observantists. Eclogue IV finds women still, as of old, servile genus, crudele, superbum. Most of its examples being classical, boys could learn simultaneously to recognize allusions and to beware women. Mantuan occasionally indulges in word-play.

invida res amor est, res invidiosa voluptas (II. 167).

Nescio quis ventos tempestatesque gubernat;

id scio (sed neque si scio, sat scio, sed tamen ausim

dicere—quid?) (III. 12-14).

his igitur quae scire nefas nescire necesse est

posthabitis (III. 41-42).

He may overlook an awkward internal rhyme.

quae mea sit me cogit amor sententia fari

liberaque ora facit (II. 160-61).

But generally he is as accomplished in ease as in classicism.

Six years after Mantuan’s collection, another Italian writer of Latin eclogues, Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530), published a vernacular pastoral, Arcadia (1504),[31] so widely popular as to become almost the sixteenth-century type. Though the name is Greek, Arcadia and Arcadian have been ever since reminiscent of Sannazaro. Through him, more than through any other single influence, vernacular pastoral spread over western Europe. For he gathered up in prose narrative with verse interludes most of what pastoral in its long history had become. Saturated in Vergil, familiar among the other Latin poets and with Greek, he had caught the possibilities of Boccaccio’s Ameto; and though he weaves throughout from literature, never directly from life, he was artist enough to weave originally. The Arcadia shows Renaissance imitation at its best.

Apter most often to attract the eye are the tall and spreading trees reared by nature on rugged mountains than the cultivated plants pruned by expert hands in decorative gardens; and much apter to please the ear the wild birds singing on green branches amid solitary thickets than among city crowds the trained ones in winsome and decorated cages. For which reason the woodland songs, too, methinks, inscribed in the stiff bark of beeches no less delight the reader than the choice verses written on the fair pages of illuminated volumes; and the waxed reeds of the shepherds in their flowery valleys offer perchance a pleasanter sound than the polished and vaunted instruments of the musicians in halls of ceremony. And who doubts that more attractive to human minds is a fountain springing naturally from the living rock, surrounded by green herbage, than all the others made by art of whitest marble resplendent with gold? Surely, as I believe, no one. Relying, therefore, on this, I may well on these deserted slopes, to the listening trees and to such few shepherds as may be there, tell the rude eclogues springing from the vein of nature, leaving them as bare of ornament as I heard them sung by the shepherds of Arcadia to the liquid murmur of their fountains. For to these not once, but a thousand times, the mountain gods, won by their sweetness, gave attentive ear; and the tender nymphs, forgetting to chase their wandering prey, left their quivers and bows beneath the lofty pines of Menalus and Lycus. Whence I, if I may, would rather have the glory of putting my lips to the humble reed of Corydon, given him long ago by Dametas as a precious gift, than to the resounding clarinet of Pallas, with which the presumptuous satyr challenged Apollo to his own destruction. For surely it is better to cultivate well a little plot than to leave a great one by ill management foully crowded with stubble.

There lies toward the summit of Parthenio, no mean mountain of shepherd Arcadia, a delectable plain, not very ample in size, being bounded by the build of the place, but so full of fine and greenest herbage that only the sportive flocks, feeding there greedily, hinder perpetual verdure. [Follows a list of its trees, with appropriate adjectives and allusions. In spring, when the glade is at its best, shepherds meet there to match their skill with lance or bow, with leap and rustic song. At such a time Ergasto, moping apart, was challenged by Selvaggio in terza rima.]

Such are the prelude to Arcadia and its first eclogue; and so it continues. For the whole book is an alternating series of prose descriptions and lyrics. There is no narrative sequence and arrival. We are bidden to linger in Arcadia, to move only from one grouping to another. The alternation of prose and verse, as old as Boethius, was new for pastoral. For its time the fluent rhythmic prose, at once easy and regulated, was the distinctive achievement. The verse is competent in a considerable range of meters. Both prose and verse, whether in reminiscence of pastoral hexameters or in feeling for a rhythm natural to Italian speech, are largely dactylic. Meter XII ends with a dactyl every one of its 325 lines; but Sannazaro’s habit is no such tour de force. His dactyls are not insistent; they are merely predominant in a pleasant variety. For he is studious of variation. In the first eclogue Ergasto’s reply links some ten tercets by internal rhyme (lines 61-91):

Menando un giorno l’agni presso un fiume,

Viddi un bel lume in mezzo di quell’onde,

Che con due bionde trezze allor me strinse,

Et me dipinse un volto in mezzo al core,

Che di colore avanza lacte e rose;

Poy si nascose immodo dentro all’alma,

Che d’altra salma non me aggrava il peso.

and then resumes the terza rima. In Meter II, lines 86-96, the responses begin by repeating the rival’s last line, somewhat as in the refrains of popular poetry. Sannazaro is a careful artist.

The diction achieves a pretty balance between ease and suggestiveness. Easy with conventionally appropriate adjectives and fluent cadences, it is full of echoes. At once we are reminded of Vergil, soon of Ovid, Horace, Theocritus, Catullus, and also of their imitators. The great range of this appropriation can be measured by the crowded footnotes of the commentators; but without measuring, sometimes without distinct recognition, we hear a constant accompaniment. Renaissance allusiveness, too often paraded, is here subdued to serve the pastoral mood. Vergil was in this glade. Theocritus set such a jar for the rustic prize. This myth is prettiest in Ovid. But though an allusion lurks under every bush, it will not leap out to detain us. Whatever pastoral poets we know help to make us yield ourselves with at least a wistful “Et ego in Arcadia vixi.” Tasso, indeed, was to outdo him with Aminta; but the difference is in degree, not in method. In 1504 Sannazaro succeeded at the Renaissance task of making literature out of literature.

Dramatic pastoral was one of the forms of Renaissance pageantry. It put shepherds, nymphs, and satyrs on the stage to enhance the celebration of court festivity with scenic device and music. It gave mythology representation without changing the pastoral type.

Though carefully limited in time to secure consecutive action, Tasso’s Aminta[32] is much less dramatic than pastoral. It weaves within the dramatic frame the pastoral tissue of wistful reminiscence. It revives the ancient dream of the Golden Age, not only through scenery and the music of instruments and of verse, but by constant allusiveness of style.

Within twenty-five pages Solerti’s notes record echoes of Sappho, Theocritus, and Achilles Tatius; of Lucretius, Vergil (oftenest), Horace, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Seneca, Claudian, Statius, Nemesianus, Calpurnius, Cornelius Gallus; of Dante, Petrarch (oftenest), Boccaccio, Poliziano, Sannazaro, Bembo—but why go on? Even so heavy a charge of reminiscence is managed without overloading. The Aminta is the most consistent, as it is perhaps the most accomplished, example of this form of Renaissance borrowing. Tasso makes discreet use of alliteration and of word-play. His musical verse should be heard, not merely read. The pervasive harmony, various and subtle, can be but suggested by underlining a few recurrences in the opening scene.

L’acqua e le ghiande ed or l’acqua e le ghiande,

Sono cibo e bevanda.

Che tu dimandi amante ed io nemico

La vita s’avviticchia a’l suo marito.

The delicate weaving of sound and sense, allusion and image, has not faded. Few works of the Renaissance have had more modern admirers than the Aminta.

The continuance of the type and the spread of its vogue appear in the twelve eclogues of the Shepherds’ Calendar (1579). Spenser turned to it as to the established European form in which to prove oneself classical and offer one’s poetic encomium. It was the obvious medium by which to win rank as a poet. But at once appears a marked difference. Instead of relying on the pastoral fund of allusion, Spenser provides an apparatus of explanation: a dedicatory epistle, a general argument for the whole series, a prefatory argument for each eclogue, and a gloss. The last explains even obvious classical allusions, interprets the allegory, indicates that this phrase is taken from Theocritus and that from Vergil, and sometimes adds learned references. Did English readers need all this? The answer is not that Sidney, Leicester, Raleigh, Burleigh, Elizabeth herself, had not read Vergil and Mantuan, but rather that Spenser, even while he must still depend for a living on the court, was conscious of a wider audience. There were already English lovers of poetry, and there were soon to be more, who, having less culture than they desired, were glad to be guided in Arcadia.

The gloss also supports Spenser’s attempt to make his pastoral English. It explains his deliberate archaism; for he tries to recall the language of Chaucer without quite understanding it himself. Though of course he caught Chaucer’s drift, he did not always catch his rhythms, nor even his grammar. Archaism, dubious enough in itself, is thus doubly dubious here. The diction of pastoral has an added strangeness. Sidney deplored this in his Defense of Poesy: “That same framing of his stile to an old rustick language I dare not alowe, sith neyther Theocritus in Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazar in Italian did affect it.” Ben Jonson’s dismissal may be blunt; but it is precise: “Spenser in affecting the ancients writ no language.” If such diction may occasionally suggest actual country speech, it is but the farther removed from the pastoral mood.

Spenser’s eclogues are English also in their nationalist fear and scorn of Rome. Cultivated by government policy, this was so widespread as to assure him a response. Moreover pastoral had always expressed controversies beyond shepherds. But pastoral allegory has been most acceptable when it is least local. Mantuan’s Observantist discussion and Spenser’s “Papists” have long been tedious. We might look them up in the footnotes, if they did not seem too remote from the concerns of the Golden Age. For pastoral at its best is not English, nor French, nor Italian; it is Arcadian, translatable readily into any language because it has no country. Its allusiveness breaks down when it sends us to a guidebook.

Otherwise Spenser’s eclogues are not distinctive. Their verbal mythology is discreetly limited to familiar deities; their imitation, except for one paraphrase of Marot, is of the usual authors; their pattern is the Vergilian type. If the April encomium of Elizabeth is fulsome, that was the habit of her court. If the metric is sometimes disappointing with crowded stresses, or padded rhymes, or even jingle, that is because Spenser was experimenting. The significance of the Shepherds’ Calendar is not its pastoral achievement, but its use of the mode to win recognition and its attempt to push pastoral farther than it would go.

In spite of its pastoral title, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (c. 1583) has a different pattern. Though it has incidental pastoral, its design is that of the long, loose, complicated, melodramatic tales of Alexandria known as the Greek Romances. These decadent Greek prose stories had wide circulation in the Renaissance; and one, the Daphnis and Chloe, is both better organized than most of them and clearly reminiscent of pastoral. Since its vogue was increased by the French translation of Amyot, it may be counted among Renaissance pastoral influences. For pastoral has appeared again and again not as the main intention of a whole work, but as an incidental interest. Though Renaissance imitation was thus sometimes of style, sometimes merely of decoration, it was also quite clearly the study of an ancient literary form.

Chapter V
ROMANCE

Sixteenth-century poetic has no specific relation to Renaissance development of verse narrative. The more pervasive counsels and habits of imitation agree in exalting Vergil. Vergil did, indeed, guide the narrative sequence of Tasso; but narrative sequence is not a general Renaissance concern. Malory, Boiardo, Ariosto, Spenser, seek other narrative values. What they have in common preoccupation and common achievement is romance. Romance in a period of classicism, romance written in spite of humanism and sometimes by humanists—what should it be? It was response to the special audience of the courts; for, whatever humanism might say, the courts liked romances. It was response also to the wider audience steadily increased by printing. The response, both in medieval continuance and in distinctive Renaissance direction, constitutes an important chapter in literary history.

1. THE ROMANTIC CONTRAST

The good old times recreated by poetry for refuge and inspiration were found by Malory and Spenser at the court of Arthur; by the Italian romancers, at the court of Charlemagne. These, of course, are the two main medieval fields of romance, matière de Bretagne and matière du roi; and into either of them may enter incidentally the matter of Troy with the progeny of Aeneas or “Hector’s arms.” Though the Charlemagne tradition may be somewhat more distinct with its twelve paladins and its one traitor, the two are essentially alike in being, for the actual world out of joint, kingdoms of chivalry. Thither the Renaissance turned from the Wars of the Roses or the hired soldiers of Italy. Gunpowder had abolished single combat; feudalism was gone; chivalry had been reduced to ceremony. Therefore romance was out of date. No; the fact that romance survived the Renaissance shows that it has no date. The romantic therefore is that poetry must once more revive ideals. Sinister violence in Warwickshire or Ferrara denies chivalry; romance revives it.

This fundamental motive strikingly unites the two fifteenth-century soldier romancers Malory and Boiardo.