The revival of classical Latin was promoted by manuals and discussions, and accompanied by still others directed to vernacular poetry. Though none of these ranks as a poetic in the sense of a contribution to the theory of poetry, not a few reveal or define habits of thought and taste, directions of study, literary ideals and methods. Thus their importance, far beyond their intrinsic values, is in their clues to literary preoccupations and trends, their indications for a Renaissance weather map.
1. VIDA
The ecclesiastic, Marco Girolamo Vida, addressed his three cantos of Latin hexameters De arte poetica (1527) to the Dauphin, son of Francis I, with due invocation of the Muses.
It invites noble youth to write Latin poetry. The doctrine is mainly an expansion of the “Ars poetica” of Horace;[51] the exemplar is Vergil.
I. Though heroic poetry is the highest, choose according to your talent heroic or dramatic, elegiac or pastoral. Let the great work wait while you sound and explore it; but meantime seize those parts that come at once, and make a prose sketch of the whole. The preparation of schooling in poetic and rhetoric is necessary as training in appreciation. [The rest of the canto is addressed, over the pupil’s shoulder, to teachers.] Greek, established in Italy by the Medici, and especially Homer, stimulate comparison. Of the Latins, the Augustans, especially Vergil, have first claim. The others may wait till taste has been matured by these. The master’s function is to awaken and guide love of the best poetry without forcing it. Even recreation may be pointed by classical suggestions. Calf love must be handled with care. So soon as young ardor has penetrated through passion to poetry, the boy should study its monuments and taste the other arts. Though travel is useful, and some experience of war, the central thing is unremitting study of the poets. Thus metric, instead of remaining merely a set of rules, becomes the testing of one’s own adjustments by memories of reading, the oral revision of a mind full of great poetry. Young ambitions should not be quelled by too severe criticism, nor lack the privilege of retirement and freedom. The world that grudges these owes its glory nevertheless to poets, who have sacrificed worldly rewards to live in their own peace. As the fire stolen by Prometheus, poetry is a divine gift.
II. The second canto repeats Horace’s counsel: begin on a subdued tone and at the crisis (in mediis). The action, planned as a whole and clearly forecast, should control the description. Greek is more tolerant of descriptive dilation than is becoming to us Latins. Need I caution against the dilation that comes from gratuitous display of erudition? The detail of Vulcan’s shield for Aeneas has the point of exhibiting the history of Rome. Variety has its claims; but rolls of kings, legends, myths, comic relief, though delightful as description, should not deviate. Be careful of verisimilitude. Do not plan for length. Work day and night on a conception limited and tried out this way and that. If amplification seems desirable afterward, Vergil shows many ways. [The citations are mainly descriptive.] Inspiration comes when it will, and does not obviate revision. Study nature: the ways of age, of youth, of woman, of servants and of kings, for appropriateness, as in Vergil; for so you learn to move, as Vergil by Euryalus. Study in others, especially in the ancient Greeks, their conceptions (inventa) without hesitating to borrow as Vergil from Homer. So may Rome ever excel in the arts and teach the world. Alas for our discords and the bringing in of foreign tyrants! though distant nations had already honored Tuscan Leo and the Medici. The crusade against the Saracens became only a dream.
III. Flee obscurity; let poetry be clear in its own light. Vary to avoid repetition. Figures give vividness to both poetry and oratory; but verse is freer with hyperbole, metonymy, personification. Figures should avoid display, incongruity, dilation. Style must always be appropriate. Follow the classics, use suggestions from other poets, adapting the old to the new, even borrowing. As a poet need not fear new words that are already recognizable, so he may go to Greek, as his classical ancestors before him. He may venture cautiously on archaism, periphrasis, compounds, adaptations. Never let words carry you beyond your meaning, except to serve the music of verse. Verse is a shrine closed to the mass of men, open to the few by a narrow way. For it must range beyond mere correctness to harmony with the persons, with the scene, with each of the three styles. Such counsels, sure as they are, will not guarantee high achievement. That can be given only by Apollo. Let us close by celebrating the supreme poet Vergil.
Commonplaces of rhetoric, from a source commonplace for centuries, why were these put into elegant Vergilian hexameters? Hardly to make the Dauphin a Latin poet; hardly to interpret what was already too well known; hardly to advance poetic. The poem is an exhibition of competence in learning, in teaching, and in Latin verse, a sort of thesis for the degree of humanist. The person that it seeks to establish as a Latin poet is its author.
2. TRISSINO
The seven divisions of poetic (1529, enlarged 1563) by Giovan Giorgio Trissino occupy the first 139 pages of the second volume of his collected works (Verona, 1729). The first four divisions are devoted to diction, metric, and verse forms. The fifth and sixth are substantially an Italian paraphrase of Aristotle’s Poetic[52] with insertions from the “Ars poetica” of Horace. Trissino repeats Aristotle without grasp of his distinctive ideas. He has read also Dionysius of Halicarnassus (105); he has the independence to disparage Seneca (101); and he considers why Dante called his great work Commedia (120); but he thinks that pastoral eclogue is of the same poetic genus as comedy, and he does not make clear that Aristotle’s distinction of dramatic from epic is in composition. Though Trissino had not penetration enough to be constructive, or even suggestive, he opened Aristotle early in the century to the wider circle.
3. GIRALDI CINTHIO
Giraldi Cinthio published together two essays on the composition of romances,[53] comedies, and tragedies (Discorsi ... intorno al comporre de i romanzi, delle commedie, e delle tragedie ... Venice, 1554). In the one on comedy and tragedy (pages 199-287, written in 1543) he moves, as Trissino, over the surface of Aristotle’s Poetic without grasping the import of poetic as a distinct form of composition. For style he even prefers Seneca (220) to the Greeks. In the essay on verse romances (pages 1-198, written in 1549) he speaks of having presented the subject in oral teaching, and refers (4) to Vicentio Maggio’s lectures on Aristotle.
The word romance has the same meaning with us as epic with the Romans (5); and the form originated in France (6). Considering first the plot (favola), as Aristotle bids, we see in Boiardo and Ariosto that romance is the adorning (abbellimento) of the strife of Christians with their enemies (9). Though thus like epic or tragedy in imitating illustrious deeds, romance has not a single action (12), but several, perhaps eight or ten. Its organization (orditura) is unhappily compared to that of the human body: the subject being the skeleton; the order of parts, the nerves; the beautification, the skin; the animation, the soul. This is the plan of the treatise.
A single action is too restrictive for romance (22), whose many actions are more desirable, as conducive to variety (25). But the actions should be connected in a continuous chain (continua catena) and have verisimilitude. The parts should cohere as the parts of the human body. The poem should be fleshed out at suitable places (26) with fillings (riempimenti): loves, hates, laments, descriptions of places, of seasons, of persons, tales made up or taken from the ancients, voyages, wanderings, marvels [in short, anything for sophistic display]. For there is nothing in heaven above, nor in the earth beneath, nor in the very depth of the abyss, which is not at the call of the judicious poet—provided (27) each be appropriate in itself and to the whole.
The appended proviso is irrelevant in theory and was not observed in practice. The age of classicism is faced with the fact that its most evident and most popular poetic achievement is not classical in composition. Renaissance romance does not follow the epic formula. True, Ariosto does begin in mediis rebus (23), as Horace bids; but even that is not obligatory for a “manifold action”; and evidently the action may be not merely manifold, but plural. By “continuous chain” Giraldi means not sequence of the whole, but merely transitions; not connection, but connectives (40, 41).
Our romancers may have learned this from Claudian (41). The breaking off of an action creates suspense; and the main stories remain in suspense to the completion of the whole poem (42). Besides, variety is itself an added beauty. Why must romances be limited to the epic way (44)? Ovid did not follow Vergil (45). But the parts and the episodes must have the connection of verisimilitude (55).
It seems difficult for Giraldi to think in terms of composition. Once more we arrive at verisimilitude; and we go on to appropriateness (il decoro).
This he has touched earlier in reprehending Homer (31) for letting Nausicaa wash clothes. Here (63-65) he insists that romance, in bringing on kings as well as shepherds and nymphs, must make each consistent with his type. After pausing to disagree with the Italian followers of Hermogenes, he passes to style (83-159), including verse. The section on verse, sometimes dubious, is often suggestive, as on Ariosto’s admirable facility (145) in making verse run as easily as prose [i.e., without inversions]. Petrarch is cited (147) as the ideal combination of weight and ease.
The concluding section (160-184) on the soul of the poem manages to lean even more on rhetoric. In oratory anima depends on delivery; in poetry, not only on this, but on such expressive words as put things before our eyes (energia, sotto gli occhi). An appendix (188-197) repeats the Horatian counsels on advice and revision.
The main significance of the treatise in 1549 is its recognition of the actual difference of romance from epic. Giraldi’s attempts at reconciling the two in theory seem evasions because he misses Aristotle’s controlling view of poetic as having its own ways of sequence, distinct from those of rhetoric.
4. MUZIO
Muzio published among his Italian poems a poetic in verse (Rime diverse del Mutio Iustinopolitano: tre libri di arte poetica ... Venice, 1551). Diffused through some 1,600 lines (pages 68-94), it is often thin and sometimes vague, the sort of treatise written not to teach, nor much to theorize, but to express the author’s culture and taste via Horace’s “Ars poetica.” What individuality it has transpires for the most part incidentally; but the treatment of metric is fairly distinctive.
Why use Greek terms: ode, hymn, epigram, elegy (71*)? Why talk of dactyls and spondees (72)? The difference between quantitative and accentual verse forbids the transfer. You will make a hodgepodge like Coccai’s.
“The ear cannot respond surely to quantity and time where the tongue must follow the stress” is at once penetrative and, in the face of the classicists, daring. After conventional remarks on verse as expressing that harmony which in nature we see to be divine, and on the ancient relation to the dance, he finds the joining of lyre with song in ottava rima (77) and in stanza (86). The Greeks and Romans, using hexameter for all “three styles,” did not even adapt their verse to tragedy or to comedy (88*) by the length of the line. Our unrhymed verse (versi sciolti) is appropriate to proud and lofty emprise (88*). For purity of style it is not enough to be born in Tuscany. Seek usage in books (70*). Tuscan is not confined to Petrarch. He was pure and fluent above all others—and perhaps more timid than becomes a poet (71).
The treatment of imitation (69*, 70, 82) and of sentences (68*, 90*, 91, 93) is conventional. Sophistic appears in the recipes for verisimilitude through appropriateness (77-78) and in the recommendation of show-pieces (Aetna, winter, spring, etc. 83). But Muzio at once makes a significant addition. “You might yourself look at nature, not merely seek it in books. Learn what to dilate, what to compress.” As examples of the force of restraint (84) he cites Vergil’s mating of Dido and Aeneas in the cave and Dante’s Paolo and Francesca.
5. FRACASTORO
A Latin dialogue (1555) by Girolamo Fracastoro discusses poetry as a form of eloquence, merging poetic in rhetoric (Hieronymi Fracastorii Naugerius sive de poetica dialogus ... with an English translation by Ruth Kelso and an introduction by Murray W. Bundy, University of Illinois Press, 1924). Ciceronian in type, it is clearly ordered and composed, and agreeably fluent in style. Fracastoro’s motive is not professional. Scientist and philosopher, he turns to poetry as to an important item in culture and a suggestive topic for discussion. So approached by not a few Renaissance scholars, it imposed no obligation to advance critical theory.
6. PELETIER
L’Art poétique of Jacques Peletier du Mans is a similar excursion of a scholar into literature. Philosopher and mathematician as Fracastoro, interested in languages, professor, promoter of normalized spelling, he was known, by that adjective dear to the French Renaissance, as “docte Peletier.” His literary associations were first with Ronsard and Du Bellay under Jean Dorat at the Collège de Coqueret; later he had associations in Lyon, where Jean de Tournes published his treatise in 1555 (L’art poëtique ... publié d’après l’édition unique avec introduction et commentaire [par] André Boulanger, Paris, 1930).
His editor, regarding it as the best formulation of the Pléiade movement, notes that it relies on Horace’s “Ars poetica” [which Peletier had translated ten years before], Cicero, and Quintilian, that it uses no Greek source and of the Italians only Vida, that the great model is Vergil, and that the section on dramaturgy is slight and feeble. He sums up the doctrine as: (1) use your vernacular and enrich it; (2) imitate the ancients; (3) imitate nature; (4) cultivate the high poetic forms urged by the Pléiade.
The little that Peletier has to say on poetic composition is all rhetoric. He makes, for example, the usual transfer of the counsels for exordium to the opening of a poem. He shows the sophistic slant in turning to encomium the Horatian commonplace that poets are givers of fame (71, 82, 89, 176) and in the stock show-pieces (127). He is more distinctive on rhyme (149), on classification of meters by the number of syllables (153), and on imitation of classical verse forms (159). He occasionally cites Ariosto (103, 201) and discusses both the sonnet and the ode (169, 172).
7. MINTURNO
Minturno made his more comprehensive and influential Latin dialogue on classical poetic, De poeta, a collection of six monologues, or essays, with enough question and objection for occasional reminder of the literary form, but with little real discussion (Antonii Sebastiani Minturni de poeta ... libri sex, Venice, 1559). The setting, a villa by the sea, is elaborately described in the introduction. The style, oratorical and inclined to Ciceronianism, is throughout elaborate and diffuse, each noun being habitually escorted by two adjectives. What is thus conveyed with much repetition is generally Horace’s “Ars poetica” once more, Cicero, and Quintilian; but there is also considerable use, though little comprehension, of Aristotle’s Poetic. Aristotle’s conception of poetry as a distinct kind of composition has not yet arrived; and poetic style, which is Minturno’s actual subject, is conceived in the terms of rhetoric. The spokesmen are: Book I Sincerus (Sannazaro) on What is poetry?; Book II Pontanus (recalled, not present) on What is poetic?; Book III Vopiscus on tragedy; Book IV Gauricus on comedy; Book V Carbo on lyric; Book VI Sincerus on style. The quotations adduced on the first two hundred pages show the following proportions: Vergil above all (Bucolics, 55 lines; Georgics, 10 lines; Aeneid, 512 lines); Seneca, 101; Horace (mainly “Ars poetica”), 99; Euripides (in Latin), 68; Sophocles (in Latin), 23.
I. What is poetry? It is a furor coelestis. Wisdom and eloquence being one, all who had it used to be called poets (Moses, Theseus, Lycurgus, Solon); for poetry was the only art of speech. Recovering now from medieval darkness, we see Vergil as the exemplar of everything, Homer as comprehending all philosophy. Poetry is imitation of nature [apparently conceived as description]. Therefore Plato’s exclusion is rejected. The imitation is narrative in epic, through personae in dramatic poetry, and a combination of the two in melic. That poetry is like painting (Horace’s “ut pictura poesis”) is agreed. Poets seek variety rather than sequence, and prefer violent or otherwise disturbed states of mind, considering the [rhetorical] headings of appropriateness to habit, place, and time. Plato’s preference of epic is approved against Aristotle’s of tragedy.
II. What is poetic? [The implication of this book, as throughout, is that poetic is rhetoric.] The ancient poets thought their distinction to be not in verse, but in lore of astronomy, optics, music, logic, history, geography. In ratio dicendi historians are likest to poets. Vergil was expert in rhetoric and logic as well as in cosmogony, morals, law and polity, medicine, athletics, etc. Poetry belongs under ratio civilis. Its object is to teach, to delight, to move [the stock summary for oratory]. It must command the “three styles” in order to be always appropriate. The natural objection of Traianus that this seems to be all rhetoric is answered by citing the distinction of verse, by slipping back to the “three styles,” and, as in a sort of desperation, by saying that the poet’s distinctive gift is to move men to wonder (admiratio). [Not only is this pure sophistic, but Minturno’s floundering is due to his seeing no distinction at all. He always falls back on rhetoric.] The poet, no less than the orator, must command inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio. Tragedy is discussed as a poem with parts like those of a speech and with descriptive amplification. Its personae are to be fashioned through the headings of rhetoric. “The other parts of an oration with which the orator is concerned, division, confirmation, rebuttal, conclusion, peroration, must also be observed (tenendae) by the poet.”
A book inquiring what poetic is, including tragedy, and quoting Aristotle, has not the faintest suggestion of a distinctive poetic composition! It can translate Aristotle’s complication and solution without seeing that his mainspring is sequence, and consider his “recognition” as a means of display.
Once more we are told that characterization must be true in the sense of being true to type: Aeneas consistently pius et fortis, Achilles iracundus et magnanimus, Ulysses prudens et callidus, according to the headings of rhetoric. After a few vague precepts on arrangement, and one more reminder of the “three styles,” a close is at last found in the epic eminence of Vergil.
III. (Tragedy) is again conventional. With little use of Aristotle, it reverts to Horace and Seneca, and repeats the rhetorical doctrine of types. Tragedy is found to consist of plot, character, words, and pregnant sentences (fabula, mores, verba, sententiae). Its externals are described, its parts enumerated, its origin summarized. It should have five acts of not more than ten scenes each. Its style should be graphically vivid. [To this counsel of rhetoric, which applies to drama only in the reports of messengers, no hint is added of the distinctive quality of dramatic dialogue.]
IV. (Comedy) after a review of the history of comedy and an enumeration of its typical personae, is devoted largely to a long list of figures used for comic effect, and closes with enumeration of its parts.
V. (Lyric) after a long introduction on convivium, with quotations from the poets, distinguishes melic from dithyrambic and nomic, and finds that lyric has as many components as drama (fabula, mores, verba, sententiae!). Its forms are ode (with epode and palinode), satiric iambs, elegy (nenia, epicedium, epitaphium, epithanatium), epigram in the Greek sense, and satire.
VI. (Style) is a summary of the section on style in any classical rhetoric, with classified examples and with the usual lists of figures.
What is the result of these 570 pages? Five men of letters, besides the author, have roles in a sort of published academy; and several others at least take a hand. They have no new ideas, except certain Aristotelian inklings that hardly seem to fit. But they are learned in rhetoric. They begin with the convention of the original dominance of poetry; they end with sixty-two figures of speech. The subject is reviewed; it is not advanced. As guidance for Latin poets—but that is hardly intended. As inspiration this oratory is much feebler than Poliziano’s; and it never even approaches that brief, anonymous ancient prose poem περι ὕψους, De sublimitate, “on reaching up.”[54]
Minturno’s other treatise, Arte poetica (1563), reduces the dialogue form to catechism (L’arte poetica del signor Antonio Minturno, nella quale si contengono i precetti eroici, tragici, comici, satirici ... Naples, 1725). Though there is some debate in Book I on the validity of romanzo narrative, elsewhere the single interlocutor assigned to each book merely asks the right questions. The work is not a discussion; it is a manual of vernacular poetry so analyzed under headings and sub-headings as to be a book of reference. Systematic and detailed, its doctrine is classical in referring everything ultimately to ancient principles. Its exemplification is abundant, with the usual preference for Petrarch.
Book I, discussing epic, includes the Divina Commedia and Petrarch’s Trionfi, and insists that the lack of unity in Ariosto’s Orlando is a cardinal fault. If the teaching of the ancients “and the example of Homer’s poetry is true, I do not see how another, different from that, is admissible; for truth is one. Therefore the variation of later times will not suffice as a warrant for letting a poem treat more than one action, entire and of just compass, to which everything else should be contributory” (35). What offends Minturno especially is Ariosto’s interruption and resumption.
Book II, discussing drama, though it gives a better account of Aristotle’s theory than the De poeta, still cites Horace, calls actors recitanti, and does not comprehend the idea of a play as a sequence of action.
Book III, dealing with lyric forms, is especially ample as to canzone. The triad of Pindar’s odes he calls volta, rivolta, stanza. His own praises of Charles V consist of five such triads. “As Pindar,” he goes on, “narrates the myths of Tantalus and Pelops, so I told the landing of Aeneas in Africa and Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, with due reference to the Trojan origin of the Romans and of the princely ancestors of Charles” (183-184). After due citation of Dante the book goes on to sonetto, ballata, and other forms with both quotation and analysis, and even devotes a page to reminder of the Latin hymns.
Book IV analyzes style under the headings of the classical elocutio and compositio, and with detailed consideration of metric. The counsels for imitation, though tolerating the usual Renaissance closeness, stop short of Ciceronianism. The concluding advice for revision is drawn from Horace.
8. PARTENIO
Bernardino Partenio devoted five books to Imitation in poetry (Della imitatione poetica ... Venice, 1560). A vernacular dialogue of the De oratore type, it achieves little interchange of views and interposes much delay by ceremonious introduction and interruption. At Murano, near Venice, the main speakers are two elders, Trifone and Trissino, and two younger, Paolo Manutio and Lunisini. The literary fiction is of instructing the latter; but whereas Lunisini remains most of the time silent, Manutio speaks often and sometimes at length. A few other persons pass across the background.
I. After the conventional introduction of poetry as the original philosophy, poetic composition is left to Aristotle and Horace, and poetic style is proposed (7) for discussion by a most confusing division: (1) inventioni through topics; (2) assontioni, which also should mean topics, but are further described as commenti and fittione poetiche (mythology); (3) ordine, conceived as amplification and variation; (4) affetti, passions and moral habit; (5) epiteti.
Imitation (11-13) is common, natural, even necessary, in spite of objectors and of Pico’s assertion that what we should follow is the idea, not the form. We may imitate a whole subject (17), or particular sententiae, or words, changing the order, amplifying or restricting, modifying. So did the ancients (24); so Bembo imitated Petrarch (25); and Terence defended his use of Menander (28). Camillo’s topics (34) for poetical inventio are set forth with many examples. Partenio’s application seems to amount to (1) mere periphrasis, (2) concrete specification, (3) amplification.
II. The next book makes plainer that imitation is dilation, especially in the direction of sophistic show-pieces (as in the use of Catullus, 73). The book is not really distinct from I. Perhaps that explains the padding (80 seq.) with discussion of poetic diction: compounds, polysyllables, figures. It closes with a survey of Sannazaro, Pontano, Fracastoro, Vida, Navagero, and the chief of vernacular poets, Bembo (86).
III. Imitation may mean the expression of human life; but specifically it is directed toward elegance of diction (93-95), and may involve the lifting of phrases (98). The awareness of style which comes from reading should be so confirmed by imitation (105) as to insure a poetic fund (copia). Imitation of style has always been legitimate (106), but with variations (110). Boccaccio’s Ser Ciapeletto is dilated by a list of specifications (119), and concludes, as it should, with a sententia. But dilation demands also the use of topics (assontioni). These are exhibited in tabular view (123) and exemplified from Vergil, Horace, Catullus, and Petrarch.
IV. Further examples lead into mythology. Order of items in the encomium recipe may be varied (155). Imitation of passions is exemplified in Vergil’s Turnus.
V. discusses appropriateness of style (decoro) under the seven ideas of Hermogenes (175), the nine sensi, and the eight instruments.
We have also learned earlier in this confusion that art not only comes from nature, but is a surer and more definite guide (35). Better take epithets from the ancient poets than hunt for them (162). Orators must use common speech; not so poets. Poetic diction should be not only appropriate and sonorous, but remote from daily speech (80).
Partenio’s main significance is the propagation of Camillo’s doctrine of topics derived from Hermogenes[55] and transferred to poetic. Thus it exhibits the common confusion both of poetic with rhetoric and of composing with writing a theme. Its abundant examples are misapplied to show how poetry may be brought on by dilation, which belongs not to poetry, but to oratory. The whole treatise might be called an art of dilation. It has hardly anything to do with writing poetry, almost everything to do with poetifying themes.
9. SCALIGER
Julius Caesar Scaliger achieved the longest Renaissance Latin poetic (Julii Caesaris Scaligeri viri clarissimi poetices libri septem ... 1561).[56] Its complacency must have been sometimes startling even to the Renaissance. The prefatory letter to his son Sylvius is magisterial.
To this art we have applied the sanctions of philosophy, which are the executives of all nature. That for lack of them it has hardly been an art before us is evident from our discussion (iii).
Horace, though he has written an “ars poetica,” teaches with so little art that almost the whole work seems nearer to satire. The commentaries of Aristotle, as we have them, are incomplete. The prudent Vida gives much good advice toward making a poet more wary, but takes him as already accomplished to lead him to perfection. We have led him by the right way through all paths to the very end (iv).
From time to time he inserts reminders of his magistracy.
Thus far Aristotle; but a more accurate account is as follows (46).
For thus, with more penetration than Aristotle’s ... (201).
No one before us has reduced figures to definite classification (307).
So much for inventio. With greatest toil amid many difficulties we have elaborated these precepts, which before us either were not explained at all, or, scattered without art or order, were merely implied, or were in substance or expression inept (432).
The Greeks are mistaken if they think we have taken anything from them except to improve it (598).
As if we were servants of the Greeklings, and not correctors (623).
His learning is too large to be limited to the subject. “Not to omit anything that makes for erudition” (170), he inserts, for example, a long chapter (I. xviii) on dancing, and another (III. ci) on Roman marriage customs. He is even from time to time autobiographical.
We too have labored not a little that this glory [of hymnus in its ancient sense] might be less obscure among the Latins (123).
We too celebrated our father, brave as he was unfortunate, in pastoral (129).
Under the title Senio we had written such a fabula, and sustained the tone with Batavian chime and with such novelty of invention as might suffice for seven Erasmuses, to say nothing of one (374).
As we wrote in the epitaph of those who fell at Vienna in the war against the Turks (426).
His longest quotation (VI. 781-784) is an entire poem of his own.
The seven books of this vast poetic in 310 chapters and 944 pages are as follows.
I. Historicus (57 chapters, 136 pages) presents poetic forms: pastoral, comedy, tragedy, mime, satira, dance, Greek games, Roman festivals, lyric.
II. Hyle (Materia, 42 chapters, 64 pages) is mainly devoted to verse-forms.
III. Idaea (127 chapters, 238 pages) discusses under the sophistic topics (sex, occupation, moral habit, fortune, endowments, etc.) the personae of the poet’s creation; sets forth the four poetic virtues (prudentia, efficacia, varietas, figura); and adds precepts for the several poetic forms.
IV. Parasceve (49 chapters, 98 pages) discusses the qualities of style, with additions on figures.
V. Criticus (17 chapters, 227 pages) is mainly a series of comparative parallels (comparationes), first by authors (Homer with Vergil, Vergil with Theocritus, etc.), then by topics (691-717).
VI. Hypercriticus (7 chapters, 134 pages) is a review of Latin poetry from the sixteenth century back.
VII. Epinomis (11 chapters, 47 pages) is an appendix.
Evidently the division overlaps; and the treatment involves even further repetition. For the book is not a consecutive treatise; it is rather a cyclopedia. Composed generally in short chapters, it indicates the subject of each by a heading, and exhibits all the headings at the beginning in a full table of contents. Thus its vogue may have been mainly for reference. Since it is a guide, not an anthology, the examples are usually brief. Longest naturally in V, the book of parallels, they are elsewhere sometimes only single lines, and rarely exceed ten. Though the great exemplar is Vergil, who almost monopolizes III and IV, they exhibit a wide range.
The object proposed is to form Latin poets: poetam creare instituimus (200); quoniam perfectum poetam instituimus (228). The book sets forth by precept and example not only how to admire and criticize—and correct even famous authors, but how to attain the company of Latin poets, how to make Latin poetry. The history of Latin poetry includes the sixteenth century, though not the Middle Age. Latin poetry has been recovered; and Scaliger, as one of its poets and one of its critics, shows how it is to be carried forward. Surveying it up and down its length, he gives much space to Claudian, Statius, and Silius Italicus, corrects Horace and Ovid, rewrites Lucan (849), estimates his own immediate predecessors. He is a schoolmaster giving praelectiones and correcting Latin themes, extending his instruction by summoning to his desk all authors and all times. He has read everything. Careful to quote the Greeks abundantly in Greek, he asserts the superiority of the Latins. For one author only he has nothing but admiration. His great exemplar, his touchstone, is Vergil.
To pass from Scaliger’s views on individual poets and poetic methods to his view of poetic as a whole is not easy, and is no longer important. As to imitation, his lack of specific precepts suggests that he has no consistent theory. The Aristotelian idea, apparently accepted at the beginning, is misinterpreted in the appendix. The usual Renaissance advice to imitate only with hope of adding luster, rhythm, or other charm (lucem, numeros, venerem adiungere, 700) refers, of course, to the other sort of imitation and offers little guidance. On the other hand, Scaliger laments his own early Ciceronianism (800), and makes some acute incidental observations. The topics of sophistic encomium in III, the stock comparisons in V. xiv, and occasional use of terms throughout show the usual Renaissance confusion of poetic with rhetoric. Though in other passages Scaliger seems able to conceive poetry in its own terms, he does not present poetic consistently as a distinct art of composition. Indeed, what he says about composition of either sort is often meager or formal. His preoccupation, from lexicography to figures of speech, is with style. The great apparatus for the production of Latin poetry remains largely rhetoric.
10. RONSARD AND TASSO
Ronsard’s brief, hasty, and perfunctory L’Art poétique (1565; reprinted, with five prefaces, Cambridge University Press, 1930) shows the Pléiade preoccupation with “enriching” the vernacular,[57] and applies the sophistic recipe for encomium to the poet’s celebration of great persons in odes.
“The true aim of a lyric poet is to celebrate to the extreme him whom he undertakes to praise ... his race ... his native place” ... (29). Enhancing his diction above common speech (41-44), he will amplify, even dilate.
The terms invention and disposition, transferred conventionally from rhetoric, do not open anything specific on composition.
Ronsard refers early to the relation of lyric to music. Except for a few such references, he has been content to gather commonplaces on style. The only importance of the treatise is in showing one of the foremost sixteenth-century poets driven, when asked for theory, as it were inevitably to rhetoric.
Tasso’s poetic, on the other hand, is the most serious, concise, and penetrative of the Renaissance. Composed in 1568 and 1570 to be read before the Ferrara Academy, the Discorsi dell’arte poetica ed in particolare sopra il poema eroico were later amplified, in Poema eroico c. 1590 and Discorsi dell’arte poetica, 1587, for Tasso’s theory was no less studious than his practice. Though he too uses the headings of rhetoric inventio and dispositio, he applies them to distinctively poetic conception and poetic movement. For he discusses poetic specifically and consistently as movement and as poetic movement. The inspiration is the Poetic of Aristotle. Working independently, Tasso grasped Aristotle’s animating ideas at about the same time as Castelvetro in his illuminating commentary (1570).[58] The following references are to Solerti’s edition of the Discorsi (1901).
The epic poet should move in his own Christian faith and history, not among pagan deities and rites (12). His field must not be too large (23-25); his narrative scheme (favola), as Aristotle says, must be entire, of manageable scope, and single (28). For unity (33), in spite of critical disputes, in spite of Ariosto’s success without it and of Trissino’s failure with it, is vital. Ariosto prevails (46) not through lack of unity, but because of his excellence in other directions. Variety (47) is desirable only if it does not risk confusion; and, properly considered, it is compatible with unity. [A clear and just rebuttal; there is no value in variety unless there is something from which to vary.]
Part III (Style), opening with the rhetorical tradition of the “three styles,” finds the third, magnifico (the Latin grande), appropriate to epic (52). [Tasso’s own practice of magnifico is neither florid nor dilated.] Ariosto’s style is medium; Trissino’s, tenue. Tragedy (53), relying oftener on specific words (proprio), is less magnifico; lyric is more flowered and adorned; epic, though ranging between the two, is normally magnifico.
Adding (55-60) a summary of the rhetoric of style, including figures, Tasso finds Boccaccio’s prose over-rhythmical. His appreciation of the force of exact words in Dante is refreshing after the earlier disparagement. He closes with an illuminating comparison (63) of epic style in Vergil with lyric in Petrarch.
Even contributions so distinctive as these are less important than the work as a whole. Tasso’s treatise is so consecutive and so well knit as to be worth more than the sum of its parts. Alike in his order and in his sentences he is firmer and more severe than his time. These Discorsi are carefully planned and adjusted for teaching. They seek neither the conversational ease of Castiglione nor the seriatim analysis of Macchiavelli; and they are far removed from the discursive suggestions of Montaigne. They constitute a reasoned, consecutive poetic.
11. SIDNEY
Sidney’s Defense of Poesy (about 1583; edited by Albert S. Cook, Boston, 1890) exhibits its moral function from mere moralizing, through winsome teaching, to incitement toward higher living.
The reminiscences of rhetoric are not accidental. Sidney makes the usual Renaissance transfer to poetry of the traditional threefold function of oratory: to teach, to delight, to move (9, 11, 13, 22, 26). Toward the end (55) he apologizes. “But what! methinks I deserve to be pounded [imprisoned] for straying from poetry to oratory. But both have such an affinity in the wordish consideration ...” [i.e., in diction; but the main defect of the treatise is in leaving vague the distinctive character of poetic composition].
Moralizing, deviating to rhetoric, Sidney is nevertheless suggestive and sometimes penetrative.
He cites Plato’s dialogues (3) as poetical. His lively account of poetry as imaginative realization (4-6) and as insight into human life makes clear Aristotle’s saying that poetry “is more philosophical and more studiously serious than history” (18). He satirizes Elizabethan ignoring of the dramatic unities (48), and sees through Ciceronianism (53). His section (55-56) on the character and capacity of English verse, all too brief, has real importance.
But he is so far from grasping Aristotle’s idea of imitation that he renders it thus:
Poesy, therefore, is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word μίμησις, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth; to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight (9).
We leap away from Aristotle to Horace’s ut pictura poesis, and so to rhetoric. This is not merely misinterpretation; it indicates Sidney’s lack of any controlling poetic principle. Though he tidily provides summaries at the ends of his sections, he has little advance of thought. His work is what it is called, a defense[59] of poetry, not a reasoned theory.
There is occasional significance in the usual Renaissance array of names. Paying his respects to the Cardinals Bembo and Bibbiena (44), Sidney immediately offsets them with the Protestants Beza and Melancthon. He calls Fracastoro and Scaliger “learned philosophers”; Pontano and Muret, “great orators”; and refers twice to the Latin tragedies of George Buchanan. His praise of l’Hospital (45) is probably reminiscent of Ronsard’s ode; for Sidney is acquainted with the Pléiade. Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Ariosto he merely mentions; but he knows the greatness of Dante and of course the charm of Sannazaro. Of the ancients, Plato is cited oftenest, then Aristotle, Plutarch, Horace of course, and Pindar. He speaks of “the height of Seneca’s style” (47), mentions Apuleius (50), and cites the “Greek Romances” in an extraordinary miscellany: “so true a lover as Theagenes, so constant a friend as Pylades, so valiant a man as Orlando, so right a prince as Xenophon’s Cyrus, so excellent a man every way as Virgil’s Aeneas” (8). His review of English poetry (45-47) scorns the intrusion of “base men with servile wits,” finds that Chaucer “did excellently”—for his time, and gives vague praise to Surrey and Spenser. The reading of the English gentleman poet has been wide, creditably classical, undiscriminating.
12. ENGLISH DISCUSSION OF VERSE
George Gascoigne’s Certaine notes of instruction concerning the making of verse or rime in English, written at the request of Master Edouardo Donati (1575; reprinted in G. Gregory Smith’s Elizabethan Critical Essays, I, 46-57) is a brief primer of English verse usage. Though it bungles in detail, it is fairly true to the English tradition of rhythm determined by stress.
The last years of the century prolonged in England a proposal to classicize English metric. William Webbe’s Discourse of English Poetrie (1586; Gregory Smith, I, 226-302. References are to these pages.) harps uncertainly on classical prosody.