Renaissance literary theory and practice

1. DISCUSSIONS ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Two Italian books of the early sixteenth century became so famous as to be almost proverbial. Written about the same time, Macchiavelli’s Principe (1513) and Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1514) are complementary. Macchiavelli expounds princely policy in war and in the truces between wars; Castiglione leads princely leisure into culture. The policy and the culture are parts of the same Italian world; but the two books are in sharpest contrast. Macchiavelli’s facts are strictly analyzed; Castiglione’s are habitually idealized. Macchiavelli’s style is stripped and so fused with the message as to be inseparable; Castiglione’s is ample, manipulating the decorative diffuseness of its time and its setting to elegance. Macchiavelli’s economy is insistent, urgent; Castiglione’s is gracious, deliberate, suggestive, rising to oratory. Both men used their thorough control of Latin to shape their writing of Italian prose; but Macchiavelli was applying rather such compression as that of Tacitus, Castiglione the composition of Cicero.

It is Macchiavelli’s triumph that consideration of his doctrine has quite submerged his style.

His name soon became a byword; for Englishmen and Frenchmen found it easier to denounce Italian statecraft than to explain wherein their own was different. Formulated for Italian despots, his doctrine that the safety and independence of the state are paramount over any consideration of justice or mercy became more and more sinister in terms of the rising new national monarchs beyond his ken. In the composition of the whole Macchiavelli was still young. He had not yet achieved the sure control felt in his Istorie fiorentine. Masterly already in expository analysis, eloquent in its close, the Principe has not a compelling logical sequence.

In sequence and in detail the Cortegiano is more mature than Macchiavelli’s Principe. Castiglione kept it by him ten years. The final revision (Codex Laurentianus, Rome, 1524) was published at Florence in 1528. All this care left the diction unpretentious. Scholarly without pedantry, Castiglione even forestalls the Tuscans by openly proclaiming his right to Lombard words. “I have written in my own tongue, and as I speak, and to those who speak as I do.” Thinking often of rhetoric, feeling the Latin period and attentive to clausula, he applies his lore to Italian sentences without stiffness or formality, happily reconciling gravity with ease. Encomium, inevitable in his subject and his time, is oftener implied than dilated. The plan of the dialogue is taken from Cicero’s De oratore. Reminiscence in detail is negligible. Castiglione’s imitation is not the common Renaissance borrowing of passages; it is the adaptation of Cicero’s plan for presenting the typical Roman statesman to survey of the typical Italian. Thus the dialogue is Ciceronian in proceeding logically from point to point. Within the frame of Cicero the conduct of the book expands the dialogue toward conversation. This is not dramatic dialogue; nor is it imitation of the Platonic quest. Rather Castiglione’s intention was to realize the human scene, to flavor the point with the speaker; and his achievement in suggesting the gracious interchange of the court of Urbino has been found quite as significant as the conclusions of his debates.

For the Cortegiano is one of the few Renaissance books that have endured the test of time. Details of place and time have been made to carry so much larger human suggestion that it has been reprinted again and again; it has been widely translated; it has today an audience not only of special students, but of the many more who love literature. Though the very term “courtier” is obsolete, though the particular social function soon faded, the book endures. It is not only the best of Renaissance dialogues; it is a classic.

The Utopia (1516) of Sir Thomas More, beginning as a dialogue on certain social evils in England, passes to descriptive exposition of a state organized and operated solely for the common weal. Though the name Utopia means “nowhere,” this polity is described as the actual experience of a returned traveler. The literary form is thus reminiscent of Lucian, whom More ten years before had translated with Erasmus. It is reminiscent also of Plato, of the travelers’ tales popular in that age of discovery and explanation, and more faintly of those distant or fortunate isles (îles lointaines) which had often been posed as abodes of idealized communities. But though these hints were doubtless intended, they are incidental. They fade as we read on.

Unfortunately for More’s literary reputation, most of us read his best-known book only in a pedestrian translation (Ralph Robinson, 1551; second edition, 1556). Keeping much of the vivacity of the diction, this is quite unequal to More’s flexible Latin rhythms.[84] For More, as for Poliziano and Leonardo Aretino, Erasmus and Buchanan, Latin was a primary language. But whereas Erasmus had, so to speak, no effective vernacular, More’s literary achievement in English is both distinguished in itself and ahead of his time. In spite of some uncertain ascriptions, we may be fairly sure that the English version of his Richard III,[85] as well as the Latin, is his own.

Continued discussion of the prince and the state moved Sir Thomas Elyot (1490?-1546) to make an English compilation for the widening circle of readers, The Governour (1531, ed. H. S. Croft, London, 1883, 2 vols.). “I have nowe enterprised,” he says in a proem to Henry VIII, “to describe in our vulgare tunge the fourme of a juste publike weale, whiche mater I have gathered as well of the sayenges of moste noble autours (grekes and latynes) as by myne owne experience.” But the “governour” and the “juste publike weale” receive no consistent discussion.

With no further design, without even a distinct idea, The Governour has of course no logical progress. Lawyer and something of a diplomat, Elyot was not a thinker. Reading widely without discrimination, and sometimes apparently at second hand, he compiled under headings. His later Bankette of Sapience (second edition? 1542) is a collection of sententiae arranged alphabetically under abstinence, adversity, affection, ambition, authoritie, amitie, apparaile, almsdeede, accusation, arrogance, etc. His Governour, though its headings have more logic, is hardly consecutive. In sources as in topics the book is a miscellany.

Elyot’s diction, though he wishes to “augment our Englysshe tongue,” is Latinized sparingly. Copie in the sense of the Latin copia, was fairly common in his time. He adds, e.g., allecte and allectyve, coarted, fatigate, fucate, illecebrous, infuded, propise, and provecte. His generally unpretentious habit is sometimes concretely racy.

Jean Bodin’s treatise on historical method (Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, 1566),[86] giving high praise to Guicciardini, differs from him in conception. For Bodin, history is less a progress in time than a thesaurus of exempla.

Systematically analytical, the book is easier to consult than to follow; but its Latin style is of that sincere, capable, unpretentious sort which had been established for history by the Italians. The political ideas of the Methodus are carried out by the same systematic analysis in Bodin’s second book, Les Six Livres de la république, 1576.[87] Greek and Latin political usage is made by a long wall of citations to support, with other proofs from history, the theory of absolute monarchy.

Such support of the new monarchies by a reasoned theory based on ancient history did not pass unchallenged. George Buchanan, with more literary competence in Latin, though with less knowledge of politics, offered for his little Scotland a theory of monarchy answerable to the people (De jure regni apud Scotos dialogus, 1579).[88] The preface, addressed to James VI, keeps a tutorial tone, as of one still laying down the law. The occasion put forth for the Ciceronian dialogue is French reprobation of Scotch politics. How shall this be met? The method is evident from the first three points.

The many exempla from ancient and modern history confirming or challenging the a priori progress of the dialogue do not touch the recent events that raised the question. Scotch history is used even less specifically than ancient to confirm the theory of limited monarchy. But though Buchanan does not prove that recent politics were an application of his theory, he makes the theory itself interesting and sometimes persuasive.

The Latin style has more liveliness, expertness, and range than Bodin’s. But the argument, though urgent as well as scholastically ingenious, remains unconvincing. After debating general considerations inconclusively, it falls back at last on the particular customs and needs of Scotland. These are not applied specifically enough to be determining. The expertness of the dialogue is rather literary than argumentative.

Brought down to the market place by printing, controversy by the end of the century was learning the ways of journalism in pamphlets. Meantime printing had opened such compilation as Elyot’s, samples of learning for those eager readers who had not gone to school with the Latin manuals of Erasmus.

The best of these sixteenth-century discussions, the piercing urgency of Macchiavelli, the charming exposition of Castiglione, the philosophical survey of More, the systematic analysis of Bodin, the hot attack of Buchanan, are all essays in that modern sense of the word which applies it to consecutive exposition involving argument. They show essay-writing of this kind—which was to move more surely in the seventeenth century—already on a firm footing. They recognize the Italian tradition of history in abjuring the decorative dilation which was habitual in other fields. They show Latin and vernacular side by side, and vernacular prose gaining point and finish from the Latin commanded by all their writers. They are a solid literary achievement of the Renaissance.

2. MONTAIGNE

The other kind of essay, the literary form that has kept the original meaning of attempt, sketch, experiment, had its pace set late in the sixteenth century by Montaigne. Nothing could be farther removed than his habit from tidy system or consecutive argument. Devoted to the reading of history, and eager to share its profits, he had no mind to follow the Italian tradition of writing history. Essai in his practice is not the settling of a subject, but the trying. He makes one approach, then another, suggesting relations that he does not carry out. With many exempla he invites us to accumulate philosophy of living. If we do not coöperate, if we do not think them over, his essays remain collections of items in memorable phrase, without compelling sequence of ideas. For Montaigne is not the kind of philosopher who integrates a system; he is a sage. He has the sage’s oral habit. No writing conveys more the impression of thinking aloud. Again and again he writes as if making up his mind, not before utterance, but by the very process of utterance. Macchiavelli, or Bodin, having made up his mind fully and finally, tries to convince us; Montaigne, as if making up his in our company, throws out suggestions.

True, some few of his essays are more consecutive developments of what he has concluded. His early and widely quoted Education of Children (II. xxvi) has even some logical progress.

But logical sequence is not Montaigne’s habit. His many revisions[89] show him leaning more and more on the aggregation of separate suggestions. He changes words, he adds instances, but he does not seek a stricter order.

His usual lack of sequence, then, is not careless. The careless fumbling that comes from muddled thinking he ridicules.

As to sequence he even catechizes himself.

And his answer is very earnest.

Montaigne’s method, then, is deliberate.[90] If he passes, as in Des coches (III. vi), from examples of lavish display to the cruelty of Spanish conquest in Mexico and frankly begins his last paragraph with retumbons à nos coches, that is because he usually prefers to take us on a journey around his idea. Hundreds of readers have found the talk of such a guide on the way more winsome than the conclusions of others after they have come home.

The art of growing an idea by successive additions sets the pace also for his sentences. Knowing Latin, he tells us, as a native language, and better than French, he puts aside Cicero for Seneca. This is more than the rejection of Ciceronianism, more than preference for Seneca’s philosophy; it is in detail the same aggregative method that he uses for the composition of a whole essay. That vernacular sentences were commonly more aggregative than those of Augustan Latin may have been a reason for his choosing the vernacular. At any rate, he keeps the two languages quite apart. Instead of applying his Latin to the pointing of his French sentences, he prefers to let them accumulate as in talk.

The sentence might easily have been recast in a Latin period; Montaigne prefers to let it reach its climax by accumulation.

So his epigrams are comparatively few and simple. His many memorable sayings are not paraded as sententiae.

For Montaigne’s shrewd summaries prevail less often by balanced sentences than by concrete diction.

Such sentences, such diction, are not only his practice; they are part of his literary theory.

So he cannot stomach that Renaissance imitation which ran to borrowing, nor that display of Latin style for itself which published even private letters.

So he is impatient with the unreality of romance.

Reviewing contemporary criticism of poetry, he says: “We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry; it is easier to make it than to know it” (I. xxxvii). “You may make a fool of yourself anywhere else,” he warns, “but not in poetry” (II. xvii). So there is no room for mediocre poetry.

Dismissing in a scornful phrase “the Spanish and Petrarchist fanciful elevations” (II. x), he exactly estimates the Latin poets of his time as “good artisans in that craft” (II. xvii). Perhaps a certain significance, therefore, attaches to his repeating the current complacency with regard to French poetry.

Elsewhere, and habitually, Montaigne’s attitude toward the classics was quite different from the habit of the Renaissance. He sought not so much the Augustans as Seneca and the Plutarch of Amyot.

These, and even Cicero and Vergil, he sought not for style, but for philosophy and morals. That sounder classicism of composition which, through the Italian tradition of history, had animated Renaissance essayists of the stricter sort he put aside. He was not interested in the ancient rhetoric of composition, nor, to judge from his slight attention to it, in that field of ancient poetic. He quotes both Dante and Tasso, but not in that aspect. He is not interested in the growing appreciation of Aristotle’s Poetic. In this disregard of composition, indeed, he was of the Renaissance; but he rejected and even repudiated Renaissance pursuit of classicism in style. There he adopted the sound doctrine of Quintilian and scornfully, to use his own word, abjured borrowed plumes and decorative dilation. If we use the word classical in its typical Renaissance connotation, we must call Montaigne, as well as Rabelais, anti-classical. Unlike as they are otherwise, they agree in satirizing Renaissance classicism.

The positive aspect of this rejection is Montaigne’s homely concreteness. Trying to teach his readers, not to dazzle them, he is very carefully specific. To leave no doubt of his meaning, he will have it not merely accepted, but felt. Therefore he is more than specific; he is concrete. Imagery for him is not mythology; it is of native vintage.

“In this last scene between death and us there is no more pretending. We have to speak French; we have to show how much that is good and clean is left at the bottom of the pot” (I. xix). Such expression strikes us not as wit, not as an aristocrat’s catering to the new public, but as the sincere use of sensory terms to animate ideas. If it reminds us sometimes of popular preaching, that is because Montaigne was a sage.