Renaissance literary theory and practice

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.