What shoulde be the cause that our English speeche ... hath neuer attained to anie sufficient ripeness, nay not ful auoided the reproch of barbarousness in poetry? (227) ... What credite they might winne to theyr natiue speeche, what enormities they might wipe out of English Poetry ... if English Poetrie were truely reformed (229).
A traditional preface on the origin of poetry leads from divine inspiration through early bards to Ovid moralized, Horace, and Mantuan (231-239). After dismissing medieval rhymed Latin as “this brutish poetrie,” Webbe proceeds to a review of English achievement.
“I know no memorable worke written by any Poet in our English speeche vntill twenty yeeres past (239).
“Chawcer ... was next after [Gower].... Though the manner of hys stile may seeme blunte and course to many fine English eares at these dayes, yet ... a man shall perceiue ... euen a true picture of perfect shape of a right poet.... Neere in time ... was Lydgate ... comparable with Chawcer (241). The next ... Pierce Ploughman ... somewhat harsh and obscure, but indeede a very pithy wryter ... the first ... that obserued the quantity of our verse without the curiosity of ryme” (242). A review of the sixteenth century surrounds Surrey and Sidney with an array of second-rate poets.
Taking a fresh start with the division into “comicall, tragicall, historiall,” Webbe finds that Chaucer (251), even as Horace (250), mingled delight with profit. After a vague word for John Lyly (256) he returns to Golding’s translation of Ovid (262). “Somewhat like, but yet not altogether so poetical” is Chaucer, whom he seems to have on his conscience. “But nowe yet at the last,” and comparable with the best, is Spenser (263). A brief return to the ancients proceeds from Hesiod through Vergil to Tusser and Googe (265).
But Webbe still wishes that rhyme were not habitual. “Which rude kinde of verse ... I may not vtterly dissalowe [266]. I am perswaded the regard of wryters to this hath beene the greatest decay of that good order of versifying which might ere this haue beene established in our speeche” (274). He even finds in English a “rule of position” (281), and that -ly is short in adverbs, long in adjectives (282). Stubbornly he closes his stupid book with an appendix (290): “Heere followe the Cannons or general cautions of poetry, prescribed by Horace, first gathered by Georgius Fabricius Chemnicensis.”
Deaf to the tradition of English verse, Webbe is blind to the development of English poetry.
Puttenham’s more pretentious Arte of English Poesie (1589; reprinted in part by G. Gregory Smith, II, 1-193), after the obligatory rehearsal of ancient seers, reads history thus.
“How the wilde and sauage people vsed a naturall poesie in versicle and rime as our vulgar is” (chapter v); and “How the riming poesie came first to the Grecians and Latins, and had altered and almost spilt their maner of poesie” (chapter vi). Classification into heroic, lyric, etc., and then into comedy, tragedy, ode, elegy, etc., is followed (chapter xxxi) by a review of English poetry as meager for a roll of honor as it is undiscriminating in criticism.
Book II, Proportion Poeticall, is a misguided prosody. “Proportion” is exhibited (chapter ii) in “staff” (i.e., stave or stanza); (iii) in “measure” (i.e., feet) estimated by the number of syllables without assigning a distinct function to “accent”; (v) in caesura ranged with “comma, colon, periodus,” terms transferred from rhetoric to serve as aspects of rhythm; (vi and following) in “concord,” which includes rime, accent, time, “stir,” and “cadence”; (xi) in “position”; and finally in “figure,” square stanzas, triangles, ovals, suitable to emblems and other devices. Through this confusion and deviation the typical English stress habit glimmers so faintly as never to be distinct. “How Greek and Latin feet might be applied in English” (xiii) leads in the closing chapters to “a more particular declaration of the metrical feet of the ancient poets.”
Book III, Ornament, is a long and elaborate classification of figures of speech.[60] It ends conventionally with typical faults, with decorum, and, in tardy caution, with Horace’s ars celare artem.
At the end of the sixteenth century, then, these Englishmen could still assume, with Ascham fifty years earlier, that English poetry had no valid tradition of its own, still seek to revive it by classicism. That classicism should be not only revival of ancient stanza and imitation of ancient style, as with the Pléiade, but even conformity to ancient metric might rather have been proposed in France or Italy, where vernacular verse had kept much of the Latin rhythmical habit. In England, where the vernacular tradition determined the verse pattern by the Germanic habit of stress, the proposal was foredoomed as futile. The insistence of the classical cult nevertheless lingers in serious discussion. The correspondence of Gabriel Harvey with Spenser on this point may be playful, or even partly satirical; but Harvey was a fanatic, and even Spenser sometimes read Chaucer’s verse strangely, sometimes in his poetical youth made strange experiments. The item that lingered longest in discussion, perhaps because it was common to both verse traditions, is rhyme. Thomas Campion’s Arte of English Poesie (1602)[61] attacked this specifically and with more understanding of English rhythms than Webbe had or Puttenham. Samuel Daniel replied with a correct but feeble Defence of Ryme (1603).[62] Classicism could attempt to deviate English verse the more easily when even poets and men of some learning did not understand the linguistic development of their own vernacular.
13. PATRIZZI
Patrizzi’s poetic (Della poetica di Francesco Patrici la deca disputata ... Ferrara, 1586) renews the quarrel with Aristotle begun in his rhetoric.
The sub-title goes on: “in which by history, by arguments, and by authority of the great ancients is shown the falsity of the opinions most accepted in our times concerning poetic. There is added the Trimerone of the same author in reply to the objections raised by Signor Torquato Tasso[63] against his defence of Ariosto.” The ten sections severally inquire: I concerning poetic inspiration (furore poetico), II whether poetry originated in the causes assigned by Aristotle, III whether poetry is imitation, IV whether the poet is an imitator, V whether poetry can be written in prose, VI whether plot (favola) is rather distinctive of the poet than verse, VII whether Empedocles as a poet was inferior to Homer, VIII whether poetry can be made from history, IX whether ancient poems imitated by harmony and rhythm, X whether the modes of imitation are three.
The divisions obviously overlap, and there is confusion in VII (152) between the origin of poetry and its essential character, in VIII (168) between historical material and history. Section VIII also misses the point of Aristotle’s creative characterization for poetic consistency. These misinterpretations, common enough at the time, are due with Patrizzi to his missing Aristotle’s idea of imitation as the distinctive poetic form of composition. Aristotle thinking of composition remains dark or wrong to Patrizzi thinking of style.[64] Thus he is typical of that general Renaissance difficulty with Aristotle which came from looking the other way. Even after Tasso and Castelvetro, Renaissance poetic kept its preoccupation with style.
14. DENORES
Jason Denores, on the contrary, made his Poetica a digest of Aristotle with a tabular view at the end of each section (Poetica di Iason Denores, nella qual per via di definitione & divisione si tratta secondo l’opinion d’Aristotele della tragedia, del poema heroico, & della comedia ... Padua, 1588). The book has no critical grasp.
Section I (Tragedy) classifies characterization by types (good rulers, bad rulers, etc.) and by the sophistic headings for encomium. “Appropriateness of the traits of the tragic personae consists in conformity (decoro) to age, emotion, sex, country, profession” (folio 24, verso). In a word, it is consistency. Chapter IX sums up what makes “una perfettissima tragedia”; and the concluding chapter (X) exemplifies an ideal tragic plot (argomento) by a novella of Boccaccio.
Section II (Epic) imposes the obligation of a single action as against the Achilleis of Statius, the Metamorphoses of Ovid, “and many of the romances of our time” (58). The Aeneid has not one action (63) and is not so well extended (distesa) as the Odyssey (66). Denores thinks that Aristotle intends the same demands as to plot (favola, Chapter I) and even as to component parts (Chapter VI) as for tragedy. Reviewing as before in Chapter IX, he again demonstrates in Chapter X by a story of Boccaccio.
Section III (Comedy) is merely an adaptation of the headings for tragedy. Denores even makes bold to say: “But since Aristotle seems to intend that the parts of comedy should be as many as for tragedy, therefore we have for convenience attributed to comedy prologue, episode, exode. The chorus we have not included, since in general it seems not to have been used” (folio 138, verso). This section, too, is concluded by a review and a demonstration from Boccaccio.
15. VAUQUELIN
The poetic of the Sieur Vauquelin de la Fresnaye is important mainly for confirmation at the end of the century (L’Art poétique de Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, ou l’on peut remarquer la perfection et le défaut des anciennes et des modernes poésies; text of 1605 edited by Georges Pellissier,[65] Paris, 1885). Conceived in 1574 and embracing the ideas of the Pléiade, it was still unfinished in 1585 and finally published at Caen only two years before the gentleman poet’s death. The latter part of the sub-title refers to the addition of a sort of catalogue raisonné of poets. Seventeen hundred and sixty Alexandrine couplets survey poetry in three books as style and metric; for composition enters rarely and in terms of rhetoric. Though Aristotle is cited, the base is once more the “Ars poetica” of Horace. Once more poetry is “speaking pictures” (I. 226); once more the Pléiade repudiates balades and rondeaux (I. 546). The doctrine of appropriateness (bienséance, il decoro) indicates characterization by type (II. 330; III. 499); and the ideal poetic combination is of instruction with delight (III. 609, utile-dulce). Instead of saying that Vauquelin outlived his age,[66] we may rather reflect that change in doctrine had been slow and was not yet recognized generally.
16. SUMMARY
In the variety of these poetics appear certain habits and tendencies significant of the period. First, the Renaissance gentleman scholar finds it becoming not only to write verse, especially Latin verse, but to discuss poetic. Sound taste and informed judgment in poetry, as in painting and sculpture, give him rank as accomplished. The people assembled by Castiglione to discuss the ideal courtier agree on this; and indeed several of them might have written the dialogues examined above. Modern readers impatient at the willingness to talk from the book without independent thinking should beware of disparaging the value of a general obligation to be informed about poetry. But even the Renaissance gentlemen who were in the stricter sense scholars seem content with learning for itself. Instead of interpreting and advancing, they exhibit.
The confusion about imitation is too general to be attributed to the stupidity of individuals. It reflects the clash of two conceptions: Aristotle’s idea of imitating human life[67] by focusing its actions and speech in such continuity as shall reveal its significance, an idea of composition; and the humanist idea of imitating classical style. As ideas, the two have nothing to do with each other; but they tripped each other in fact. For the first was new, not yet understood either exactly or generally; and the second was a widespread habit of thought. Imitation suggested classicism. Aristotle, being an ancient, must in some way be reconciled to this. Meantime it is evident, especially from the more commonplace discussions, that though the theory might not be clear, the practice inclined toward dilation and borrowing. Ciceronianism, even while it waned, had spread far beyond Cicero. Bembo’s imitation of Petrarch was not a reproach; it was an added virtue.
The cult of the great period does not preclude citation of Claudian, Statius, Silius Italicus; and Scaliger adds Ausonius and Sidonius. Even Apuleius is not excluded; and space is occasionally found for the dullness of Aulus Gellius and Macrobius. The “Greek Romances” of Achilles Tatius, Apollonius or Heliodorus find place not only with Cinthio, Scaliger, and Vauquelin, but also with Ronsard and Sidney. Indeed, those poetic habits summed up in the term Alexandrianism and corresponding to the decadent rhetoric called sophistic, crop out often enough to suggest a considerable vogue. The sophistic recipe for encomium is accepted by Ronsard; and there is common approval, in doctrine as in practice, of parenthetical dilation by descriptive show-pieces. So the rhetoric of Hermogenes, embraced by Camillo and Partenio for poetic, is mentioned elsewhere with respect. Alexandrianism is at least an inclination of the Renaissance.
But the commonest sign of the times is the unabated vogue of Horace’s “Ars poetica”. It is gospel as much to the Renaissance as it had been to the Middle Age. The cynical explanation would be its very shallowness and conventionality; but probably the deeper reason is that Renaissance thinking on poetic, as Horace’s, was essentially rhetorical. Here, at any rate, is the main significance of these poetics. Various as they may be otherwise, they have this in common. Tasso stands out as an exception, in theory as in practice, by his clear view of poetic as a distinct art of composition; and he is supported by Castelvetro’s penetrative interpretation of the Poetic of Aristotle. But Vauquelin has not heard them; and even Sidney, though he sees the distinction, still falls back on rhetoric. Even to the end of the sixteenth century, Renaissance poetic was largely rhetoric.[68]